like what? child porn? incitement to murder? sure. i live in the West and i support suppression of that

like political criticism? religious satire? no. i do not support that

the country that limits a few vicious topics is not at all like the country that locks down all political speech threatening the political status quo

the former is very much a free country, the latter very much not a free country, and the difference is substantive and real and very serious

if you think a country that censors child porn is exactly the same as one that censors political speech, you're only announcing yourself as a moron who doesn't understand the topic

no, ask most english speakers what 50 cents means and they think Curtis James Jackson III born July 6, 1975

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5...

you really do have to spread the word about astroturfers paid by the chinese government to vomit propaganda on social media, most english speakers really are not aware of them

you've listed a bunch of red herrings, tangential topics, and pointless observations to say nothing valid or interesting at all on the topic

it's as if you lack the capacity for critical thought... or you are demonstrating a weak timid mind taught that to approach certain taboo topics and verboten observations leads to punishment

hmmm...

so here we see the mediocre fruitless mental quality of someone raised in a walled garden of a "harmonious" society of cotton headed propaganda tools

so you're saying that criticism of the chinese government is ok, as long the chinese government approves the criticism

do you even listen to yourself? how propagandized and/ or braindead do you have to be to not see how stupid that sounds?

Got stuck with Vipre at work for a few years. It was nothing short of a complete disaster, to the point where on some systems, it just had to be shut down completely so the systems would function. Combined with the latest ratings from AV Comparatives (lol @ 88% detection rate and huge false positives) and I'd say nobody should ever run that garbage. It's truly terrible.

ESET's NOD32 is good and Kaspersky is very good. Nothing else has been consistently good for quite a while.

However, The Bonding turned into a very interesting story because of that

It's a good episode, but when Moore finally got to do his holodeck-as-coping-mechanism episode in It's Only a Paper Moon, it was one of the best episodes in the entire ST universe...

I liked Enterprise, particularly the Manny Coto episodes.

In that case they were under the influence of a malevolent entity... :)

Sure, there are going to be mediating forces in the environment. Melting is an obvious one. The positive feedbacks have been getting the most attention because they are really scary. It appears that there are gas clathrates in the ground and under water that can come out at a certain temperature. The worst case is that we get an event similar to Lake Nyos, but with a somewhat different mechanism and potentially many more dead. The best case is a significant atmospheric input of CO2 and methane that we can't control.

I don't think I have to discount Trenberth. He's trying to correct his model, he isn't saying there is no warming.

TNG got better in the second second, years before Roddenberry died.

Yeah, that's when he got sick though and handed production over to Pillar and Berman. Note that the movies only got good after Roddenberry was kicked up to "Executive Consultant" and was frozen out of the process.

Even when he was out of the loop on TNG, Roddenberry still managed to screw with early Ron Moore screenplays like The Bonding, loudly insisting that "children in the 24th century wouldn't morn their parent's death."

Just as a counterexample, note the furferraw when Majel said that Gene would have disapproved of the Dominion War.

(Yeah I'm a Ron Moore fanboy, as the sig would attest.)

Yeah maybe I meant that. Animated series might actually go higher than the first two seasons on TNG, though.

His plots aren't all that bad.

Ah, I'd direct you to the writings of Harry Plinkett on that question. It's not just the plot holes, but really fundamental aspects of the prequel films: what is the Trade Federation, why are the blockading, what is the Republic exactly (The queen of Naboo is elected, but the senator of Naboo is appointed?), what is the fundamental cause of the rebellion, what exactly are the Jedi... These reflect on Lucas's really fundamental cynicism, and his inability to write characters as if they're intelligent agents that know what's going on, and his lack of faith in the audience to think about any of this stuff critically.

The first trilogy managed to keep all these balls in the air, but he didn't write those. George's writing work isn't really represented in any of the original Star Wars films. Larry Kasdan wrote V and VI, and though George's name is on the first one, he had a ton of help from Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins, Will Huyck, Gloria Katz, Alec Guinness, de Palma, Spielberg and many, many others, who he failed to credit.

I dunno, he had a great original concept -- Flash Gordon meets World War II genre films -- and he saw it through to the conclusion, and he was the central person in those early films, but all the good stuff happened when he got out of the way and let the actors, Gary Kurtz, John Dykstra, John Williams and his wife Marcia do their magic. At some point in the 80s, after he banished Marcia and Gary and surrounded himself with sycophants, George must have thoroughly convinced himself that he did everything himself.

He doesn't give the actors feedback or direction - he expects them to bring the characters to life and flush out the nuances on his own.

Note that Michael Bay is known for this as well, and the results are very different. Not good, but different.

I strongly believe that Jake Lloyd was awful in Phantom Menace because of Lucas' directing style.

Jake Lloyd was terrible because George Lucas, himself, didn't know what Anakin was supposed to be or represent, what it was like to be him, what it meant to be a slave on Tatooine, or any of that. The character has no purpose in the movie but to establish that Anakin exists. Even if George were a "hands on" director, he wouldn't have had the slightest idea what to tell him. "Just sit in the cockpit while the battle happens."

Low bar.

He'll always be involved. Even if he doesn't participate in the making, he'll be the first person everyone asks when the new one comes out and his opinion is going to carry a lot of weight.

Notice that Next Gen only really started getting good after Roddenberry died, and DS9, being the best Trek series ever*, was flatly impossible as long as he was alive. Even when these people are out of the loop, they are the "author" in the public mind and have a lot of clout.

* I dare you, come at me!

So this-or-that company promises you unbreakable encryption or that they won't poke their nose in your data. Do you trust them? I don't. All it takes is a little firm chit-chat from the national security agency of the country your data is hosted in, and your "safe" data isn't safe anymore.

If you really insist on putting files and shit in the cloud, encrypt it yourself before uploading it. Better yet, run your own server and provide yourself with your very own fucking cloud. Those who want real security aren't lazy and do the work themselves.

Thanks.

McKitrick is an economist out of his field. Trenberth and Fasullo cite many of their other papers and the publications to which they were submitted, but it seems mostly not accepted. But their conclusion seems to be that there were other times in recent years that the rate of warming decreased for a time only for it to return to its previous rate. I only see the abstract for Kosaka and Xie, but they state "the multi-decadal warming trend is very likely to continue with greenhouse gas increase."