So are we allowed to shout "Bear!" in a crowded cinema?

The Aliens are intelligent. They've got VERY big brains, they're possibly socially telepathic, and they've gotten around the cultural problem of a lack of information-continuity between generations by developing (or adopting from another parasitised species) a form of inherited memory. That's how the Ripley-Alien hybrid clone has memories of being Ripley.

The nasty question posed by the inherited-memory thing is: The aliens have a fetal stage (implanted by the face-huggers) during which they adapt to their new environment by adapting to and adopting elements of their host's biology ... and presumably they also retain memories from the Queen that laid their egg. During the adaptation process, does the alien fetus, which potentially has telepathic abilities, also imprint on the memories and personality of its host?

In other words, when Little Aliens burst out of humans and become Big Aliens, do those Big Aliens then have false memories of being human? That might go some way to explaining why they're so pissed off.

While there's stuff like that that still needs to be addressed, I think there's space for at least one more film, and if we're going to be seeing unexplored aspects of the Alien biology, it's cool that they've got Giger onboard to extend and elaborate on some of his original designs.

Alien was essentially an old-school "haunted house" movie. Or, more specifically, a "trapped in an isolated haunted house at night, with a monster, unable to leave, with no way to call for help, trying to survive until daybreak" movie. The spaceship made an exceptionally good haunted-house-substitute. Isolation - check. Nothing outside to escape to, and no neighbours - check. Substitute "survive until daybreak" with "survive until the ship reaches Earth". Classic setup, well executed.

I think Manga's still supposed to be a multi-billion-dollar industry, and people who work in or around the industry are expected to be conversant with this stuff. Being able to quickly find a relevant Wikipedia page when you need to check something can be really, really useful.

Yep, it's partly the =absence= of qualified professionals that made Wikipedia so great.

Wales still seems to have trouble understanding this. It's like, he still wants Wikipedia to be a "proper", legitimate, "official" encyclopedia that he can be proud of when he talks about it at dinner parties, staffed by proper academics and proper encyclopedia professionals. He wants it to be a certified, corporate, properly quality-controlled enterprise. Like Microsoft, or Disney, or , uh, Fox News.

Trouble is, if you take a successful and thriving volunteer programme, and you get a chunk of money and hire a bunch of academics to "sort it out", the project dies. The guys you hire won't be as involved or as dedicated or as knowledgeable or enthusiastic or as involved as the people they replace, because if they were ... they'd already be contributing.
Wikipedia is huge. Any academic who isn't already a serious contributor isn't worth hiring, and any academic who already //is// contributing, you already have for free, so ... why spend donor's money fixing what ain't broke?

The other problem is that Wales sometimes seems to be fairly reeking disdain for the Wikipedia project. If he starts hiring-in "proper" academic editors from "outside" in an attempt to change the culture, then by rating those individuals as more important than the people who actually built and maintained Wikipedia, he'd be basically pissing in the faces of the people who made WP such a success. How do you stay motivated as a contributor, if the organisation basically declares you to be inferior to some newbie outsider who's going to get all the credit, and public glory, and superuser priveleges, and get paid for it too?

Wikipedia does have some serious issues that need sorting out, but those are arguably partly Wales' fault. For instance, he keeps complaining about the lack of serious researchers contributing to WP, and cites this as a reason why the WP project has failed, and why other encyclopedia projects are necessary.
Truth is, the reason why more experts don't contribute isn't just because of WP culture, it's because one of Wales' own favourite WP rules expressly ==prohibits== anyone from adding or editing information that relates too closely to their own original research. A lot of good technical info seems to be added to WP by people breaking this rule, and editing under aliases. If Wales wants more expert-written articles, the obvious thing to do (without spending any money!) is to relax the current rule that explicitly bans experts from writing about their own specialist fields (on the grounds that they're biased). Or maybe to accept that WP actually has a large number of articles written and edited by known experts, who are smart enough to do it anonymously, because their priority is that the article be great, and that it not be turned into a political debating forum between people with something to lose. Articles should be judged by their content, not their authors' reputation. Using named experts means that article debates become personalised.

Another problem with hiring academics who aren't already contributing is that some of them won't be prepared to put up with being edited by less qualified folks, and some of them, although they might be top-notch as experts, are likely to absolutely suck as encyclopaedists. A world-class organic chemist or mathematician or particle physicist may have no idea at all as to how to write a coherent Wikipedia article. They may not have ever used Wikipedia. They may not have used any encyclopedia at all since they were kids. They may be completely clueless about what an encyclopedia is, and what people use it for.

Wikipedia, when it's working well, it a ruthless meritocracy. Edits and articles live and die purely on perceived quality and usefulness. It doesn't matter what your qualifications might be, or how many years you spent studying a subject, or whether you won the subject's Nobel Prize last year ... it still might be that you know less about how to write a clear, efficient properly-formatted introductory WP sentence and paragraph on your specialist subject than some spotty eighteenyearold.

I think that one of the things that damages Wikipedia is its continuing association with a founder who doesn't seem to believe in the project's core values, who seems to think that the project is fundamentally flawed, and who always seems to be trying to reshape WP to be more like one of the other, more "pro" encyclopedia projects, which so far have all been dismal failures, or trying to set up competing projects that he seems to think ought to replace WP. Someone who believes that the WP project was a mutant that shouldn't have been successful and that it ought to die and be replaced with something else of his own devising, isn't really the best person to be promoting WP or working seriously on its improvement.

I'm not even sure why Wales is still involved with WP, except that it gives him a useful platform for promoting himself, and through that, helping to increase the visibility and fundability of his future non-WP projects. Right now, I think he's a net liability.

I suppose that they still have the option of keeping "diaspora" as an organisation name or project name, and calling the user release something else that's related to the diaspora branding, but with a cuter primary-coloured logo ... "dandelion" might be cool.

(Note to the Diaspora developers: if you like that idea please use it, I promise not to sue.) :)

Yep. The idea is that it links into all your existing social networking sites, but also has its own stuff. So you can continue using all your existing contacts and links while considering whether to migrate stuff over to Diaspora itself.

If you do decide to use Diaspora for all your new material, the advantage is that all your Diaspora stuff is free from any sort of vendor lockin - if you decide that you don't like your current Diaspora hosting company, you can pick up your "house" and move it to someone else, or even to your own server, hopefully without losing your address or links. Download your data, delete it off the server, upload it to another server, re-register your seed on the new server, and ... hopefully ... nobody will notice.

It becomes //your// homepage, not Yahoo's or Facebook's or Google's.

Well, if we're going to be picky, if you check what your dictionary defines as a "wing", you'll probably find that the corresponding first definition is something to do with the flappy things on birds. Dictionary.com doesn't mention the "aeronautical" definition of "wing" until definition #9, so by the argument you used, we probably shouldn't call what aircraft do "flying", either, because their "wings" aren't biological structures, and don't flap.

AFAIK, "spaceflight" is pretty much the standard term for the technical subject, for instance, here's an introductory NASA page on the subject.

"Traveling" is too vague. Spacecraft "travel" when you trundle them to the launchpad on trucks, and if we're doing astrometrics, motion is relative and the concept of whether something is "traveling" or not becomes complex. You're "travelling" right now as the Earth orbits the Sun.

If we want a term to describe orderly controlled non-surface relative motion through a rarefied medium, "flight" isn't bad, "fly" has the advantage of only being one syllable, and we already have the concepts of "powered" and "unpowered" flight. Sure, it's not aerodynamic flight, but there are other cool environmental things to make use of, like the gravitomagnetic fields of passing planets, for slingshotting.

PS: Ever noticed how much the "bing" logo looks like the logo for "Blender"?

Okay, "looked", past tense. They've now changed it. But the "bing" favicon on my browser is still a blender-like blue b with an orange target bullseye.

May 2009: Microsoft launch a new ... search engine ... and call it bing
Sept 2010: Apple launch a last.fm ripoff and call it ping.

The people who own the ding.com and qing.com domains must be hoping that someone makes them an offer soon.

People are really running out of ideas.

PS: Ever noticed how much the "bing" logo looks like the logo for "Blender"?

The one think you have to understand about Jobs is that he's primarily motivated by good design.

No, he's partially motivated by the desire for his products to make a design //statement// ... which isn't quite the same thing.

What we think of as "great" design often isn't very "good". Consider the Phillippe Starck lemon squeezer:

Iconic design, instantly reconisable, a design classic. But the eighty-dollar Starck squeezer supposedly isn't as good at squeezing lemons as one-dollar plastic thing from Walmart. It makes a mess, and it's intrinsically a bad idea to make a lemonjuicer out of a metal like aluminium, it reacts and potentially taints the end-product. There's a gold-plated version ... gold-plating is often a very functional feature, but with the Stark, gold-plating the item means that it ends up even less functional than the simple cast-and-polished version, because lemon juice messes up the finish on the "plated" version, so the "gold" version is strictly for show. It's designed for looks rather than for satisfying its official core purpose. It's a lemon squeezer that shouldn't be allowed to come into contact with lemon juice.

Apple's iPhones have always looked cool, but for years they weren't particularly good phones for making phone calls. Bad acoustics, no recordable user-ringtones, no tactile speed-dial buttons, no swappable battery. If making and receiving calls was a priority for you, you were better off with something much cheaper. Similarly with the internal architecture of the iPhone3.x OS, as a personal organiser-type device, the OS design was quite appalling compared to, say, where Palm OS had been ten years earlier. No synchronisation API? No OS support for rich text? If you wanted to synchronise raw text files from your iPOS3 device to a Windows PC from the onboard Memo app, by default you couldn't, because the iTunes software didn't "do" any form of wordprocessor file, including basic unformatted text. It wasn't a "Windows" problem, it was an "Apple" problem. You had to go out and buy Microsoft OneNote, and have iTunes synch memos with //that//. iPOS3.x didn't even have support for to-do lists, which probably ranked it lower than those old late-eighties Casio and Sharp things that looked like plastic toys.

I have an iPod Touch, and use it almost exclusively with a Google Calendar app and Evernote (plus a bit of Google mapping and web-browsing). I find it too awkward to use as an MP3 player. The curve of the back of the case is a nice bit of design meant to make the device look as slim as possible for a given volume, but the effect is then ruined by Apple's decision to use a mirror-finish chromey "Look At Me!" backplate, which makes the back as noticeable as possible. Mine got scratched within ten minutes of taking it out of the box, and I now have it stealthed in black sticky-tape. It's actually nicer to use without the eye-jarring mirror-finish rim, but I guess their priority was to make it "blingy", even if that conflicted with other aspects of the design. Ergonomically, the iPad's single button screams design suckiness. People like clicky edge-buttons to flip pages and hotlink favourite apps, But with the iPad, Apple insisted that you didn't need more than one front button. Then with iPOS4's added features, they had to squeeze extra features onto the single button using double-clicks. The device's hardware interface was already outmoded by the time that the accompanying OS was finished and the unit was ready for release. //Good// design would have given the iPad at least five buttons, rather than launching the gadget with just one and keeping the multi-button iPad as a possible must-have upgrade for 2011 or 2012.

Apple don't do "good" design. Apple have marketed some brilliant design classics in the past (first G4 desktop) plus a few staggeringly awful design blunders (the old clamshell iBooks, anyone?), but they now specialise in creating aspirational designer //objects//, which is a different thing. If I had a really big expensive kitchen, I might quite like a gold-plated Stark juicer as a piece of yuppie decoration ... but if I want to actually squeeze a lot of lemons, and want a //well-designed// lemon squeezer, chances are that the thing I'll end up buying will be less pretty and made out of cheap-looking plastic. It won't look as good, but it'll work better.

Apple aim for truly //great// design, and sometimes they hit the mark, and sometimes they completely miss, or simply can't be bothered. Often there's a wierd combination of hits and total misses in the same product - the animated screen-rotation effects on my iPod are great, the fact that "desktop" only works in one orientation is crap. They've spent resources on making sure that the "eye-candy" features work, but left major holes in the basic functionality. I can zoom in on a map with a tap of my thumb, but to zoom out requires a two-finger stretch, which means I need to use both hands, one to hold the device and the other to supply the two fingers, because there's apparently no other way to zoom out. It's a user interface with a lot of "tinsel", but it ignores decades of research that people have done on real-world GUI engineering.

In the same way that it's possible for a person to be "great" without necessarily being "good" ("great" leaders are often "bad" leaders, and "great" people are often scumbags), and for architecture to be "great" without being "good" (Frank Lloyd Wright's "Fallingwater" being the classic example of a building that's simultaneously architecturally great and architecturally substandard) Apple's design is often "great" without satisfying the level of baseline functionality across the board that would qualify it for being entitled to be called "good" design.

The criteria for "greatness" tend to focus on the peaks, on what something does really well. The Titanic was a //great// ship, even if it wasn't a //good// ship. Apple products often have standout "great" features.

But the criteria for something being considered as "good" tend to take more account of the wider spread of both good and bad aspects, and to be considered "good", a design can't fail any significant criteria by a significant amount. Apple products often include significant "fail factors" that Apple enthusiasts are willing to overlook and forgive. Whether those problem aspects are due to a lack of expertise, or a desire to get a product released early while it's still "hot", or a tendency to focus on developing the "cool" aspects of a product at the expense of spending time on the more boring "housekeeping" features, or whether it's a case of deliberate incompatibility and market segmentation and/or planned obsolescence (buy the new model to get the feaure that was missing from the last version) ... or whether it's simply design fetishism on the part of Jobs isn't always clear.

But whatever the reason (or combination of reasons) for Apple's products being the way that they are, "good" design doesn't seem to be a company priority. "Good" design is often unobtrusive ... it often works so well that you don't even consciously notice that it's there. Apple products usually put more emphasis on being noticed, they take the more "designer couture" approach because that's how they build their brand. Going back to the Starck lemon-squeezer, the guy famously designed the world's most expensive squeezer, that was possibly also the world's //worst// squeezer ... and it made his name. And it still sells. On the other hand, there must be stacks of other designers out there who've designed better, cheaper devices, and nobody knows who they are. But people get more pleasure from buying the big expensive metal Starck product than spending a fraction of the money on a little plastic or glass thing that works better. It gives them something to look at, and show off to their friends, and talk about. Its a reference point and a retail-therapy "treat", and a certain proportion of the Apple user-base like to buy Apple products for the same reason. They're feel-good products (like Gucci handbags), and, like the fashion accessory market, brand recognition and product "buzz" is more important than actual functionality. //Perceived// functionality and quality is important, but the most important thing on a Gucci handbag is that everyone else who sees it recognises the big "GG" Gucci logo. In that market, the recognition that a product is a "designer" product is more important to sales than whether or not the product actually represents "good" design in the conventional sense.

According to Wikipedia (cue mass sigh of disbelief), US Federal Law requires alcohol content to be displayed as an ABV percentage, and while a proof figure is //allowed//, if used, it has to be displayed near to the official ABV figure.

If true, that suggests that, even in the US, ABV is now considered the proper legal method of citing alcohol content, and that the "proof" figure is just a historical/traditional hangover (sorry) .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholic_proof#United_States

I notice that BrewDog's 32% ABV beer (which comes in a more conventional bottle), is called Tactical Nuclear Penguin.

I think that the Linux community should consider adopting it as their beer of choice.

According to the product photos, the other beers on the company's website use clear ABV labelling. I don't know if the squirrel has a label. Maybe it has a handwritten tag tied with string to its foot or something.