I always liked about:robots the best.

Actually it was Roy Brown (another Canadian) who shot down the Red Baron. Billy Bishop was famous for having the the second most kills of all the WWI pilots. The Red Baron having the most of course.

Shifting goal post? Uh I'm pretty sure the goal post has always been the Turing Test, and that was set before computers were invented.

I think Pearson was actually a pilot in WWI, though yeah, not a hero like Billy Bishop

well think of hiring Will Smith as being a marketing decision.

Sort of like how there's no reason for me to use a particular brand of razor just because a sports star recommends it, but the companies that make razors spend millions for that sports star to be in their advertisement.

Yeah maybe it doesn't make a difference to you or me, but to a lot of people it does. And besides the simple name recognition factor, there's also the fact that if Will Smith makes a movie and it bombs, well his reputation suffers. If you respect an actor and think he's made good decisions about which movies he appears in in the past, well it makes it more likely that the next movie he decides to appear in will be good. Conversely, if Ben Affleck appears in a movie you're probably going to be a bit suspicious about it as he's been in a lot of bombs.

Personally I don't really care about Will Smith, but there are a lot of actors I find entertaining. I always find Samuel L Jackson to be entertaining (well except in the Star Wars prequels, but I prefer to pretend they didn't happen). Bruce Willis is pretty cool too. And Robert Downy Jr. has been on a roll lately. Of course, I find it to be more reliable to look to the director of the movie to gauge its quality.

Yes, an unknown actor might be more talented than the star actors I like. But an unknown actor can be total shit too. Same can be said about directors too. So if I see a movie which has actors that I find entertaining, is directed by someone that has made other movies I enjoy, then yeah its more likely I'll watch that movie. Sherlock Holmes is an example of this. If it had unknown actors and an unknown director I would have had a neutral opinion on the movie. But because of the cast and the director, I had a better idea what to expect, and it delivered. If the movie was all unknowns, well given all the previous versions of Sherlock Holmes being a stuffy older guy with a funny hat and a pipe, well I may have given it a miss. Maybe if I heard some good word of mouth about the movie I'd eventually check it out. But the presence of actors that consistently delivers gets my ass in the seat at the theater.

Its a fluff piece. So yeah its meant to be somewhat amusing, but unlike a lot of fluff pieces it tries to inform the reader about something thats pretty significant, japan's demographic problem.

Uh, no the courts shouldn't just decide that they don't like the law and won't enforce it. They should be enforcing the letter of the law, because if the letter of the law isn't in line with the spirit of the law, then the law should be changed.

If the courts have the power to decide what's legal based on their own gut feeling, then they are effectively making the laws, which is something that parliament should be doing.

And neither should parliament (especially not a minority government) should be able to dictate what should happen without following the law.

So the Tories want to let this company operate in Canada. The courts say "Hey, that's actually against the law". The next step is for the Tories to change the law. At which point the courts say "yup its all good legally now". A change to a law should be debated in parliament, not changed by a some appointed judges that disagree with it.

They pay Will Smith $20M per movie because having his name above the title will likely get about $20M from people that want to watch a Will Smith movie. Yeah maybe you don't like Will Smith (myself I'm Will Smith neutral) but there must be actors that you like and their involvement in a movie will make you more likely to go see the movie.

Yeah its ridiculous that the idiots on Jersey Shore get so much money. But people watch them for some reason and without those idiots they don't have a show and they don't have viewers. But 50,000 per episode is cheap. The cast of Friends were getting $1M per episode each. This is of course the reason why there has been a shift to reality television.

Anyway don't worry about it. If you don't like the entertainment business, you don't have to buy or even view the stuff they put out.

Dude relax, it was just a joke.

they population of Japan is expected to shrink by something like 20 million in the next few decades. Thats a lot of empty living spaces.

And Japan has adapted fairly well to dealing with the high population density. I don't think its a fear of more people thats the big factor here. Its a fear of having different people, ie xenophobia.

Well yeah, I've traveled a lot and in every country I go there are usually two languages: the local language and english.

English is the lingua franca (yeah I know the origin of this term). If two people meet and they are from different countries, then 99% of the time the language that they will be able to best communicate in is english. Yes more people know chinese than english, but if you see a chinese person talking to a japanese person, more than likely they will be speaking english.

And many of the people you meet are probably being polite and will talk with you in your language to make things easier for you. Remember that you may want to practice your french or german or italian, but unless you're paying someone for a lesson they may get impatient while you're struggling to understand when they know you'll understand each other better if they just talk in english. And besides, they probably want to practice their english just as much (if not more) than you want to practice your italian.

IE is a few steps behind its competitors and it has the biggest market share of all the browsers. Thats how MS rolls... they don't have the best products they just leverage their marketshare in one area to get market share in another. So most people use windows and most of the people using windows use IE and most of the people using IE use Bing. It doesn't matter if Bing isn't as good as Google search, people will use it because its the default and it works "good enough". But if people aren't finding the stuff they're looking for on Bing they might actually take the effort to type google.com in the address bar and if they have to do that enough times they might take the effort to figure out (or ask a friend) how to make google the default search. What MS is doing is if they can't find a result through their algorithm, they use sneaky means to return the google results which keeps Bing in the "good enough" level which means less people will bother going to google and/or changing their default search engine.

I think google just wants to nip this in the bud.

Obama prevented a war with Iran by being elected. If John McCain was elected president the US would have bombed Iran. But since Obama got elected Iran hasn't been bombed.

Yeah maybe if Iran gets the stuxnet situation worked out and their nuclear weapons program back on track maybe the US will have to bomb Iran sometime in the future. But we at least have a chance for peace as opposed to certain war if Obama hadn't been elected.

Damn I wish I had mod points.

+1 Insightful!

traditionally its zombies that eat people's brains.