No, they weren't. You don't have Han Solo shooting Greedo first in a kids movie. You don't have Darth Vader torturing Han Solo and cutting off Luke's hand in a kids movie, or Lando betraying Han. I don't even think you have the Rebels getting their asses kicked from one end of Empire to the other in a kids movie.

The original trilogy were all-ages movies. The kids could enjoy them, the adults could enjoy them, and they (until Return) didn't insult anybody's intelligence.

This "they were only ever kids movies" is pure Lucas bullshit intended to paper over just how bad the prequels really are.

I read "download all your mail" as being equivalent to "read your mail when you're not connected". On top of that, you only see one button; it either appears beneath "Benefits" or "Alternative". So I had no idea whether the feature was on or off at install; I had to go into the preferences screen to find out for sure (by which time I'd already seen TB3 building an offline GMail folder and went hunting for how to stop it). Really bad UI.

Or you could make life a lot easier on yourself and just buy a slow cooker. Turn it on in the morning when you leave for work, and the beef is ready to eat when you come home. You can even be late getting home and the beef won't be ruined.

Actually, save and print aren't on the ribbon. They're buried under that weird Office logo thing that doesn't look the least bit like a button. Still have no idea WTH MS were thinking with that.

Not only that, but a former member of the CHRC (or CHRT - I forget which), one Richard Warman, the complainant in this case, has been responsible for something like half of all "hate speech" cases filed at the tribunal over the last several years. Anything this little snake finds on the internet that he decides is hateful, he files the complaint and looks to cash in. Ezra Levant has been doing a lot of legwork on exposing this corrupt little cesspool for what it is over the past couple of years, ever since he got hauled before them to defend his publishing of the Mohammed cartoons when he ran the Western Standard magazine.

Unfortunately, this ruling does not strike down the law. That's beyond the CHRT's power. The adjudicator's only remedy was to refuse to apply the law and dismiss the case. The law is still on the books and the ruling does not have the power of precedent unless appealed to a real court and upheld. So while this is a big step in the right direction, the fight's not over yet.

I'm sorry, but you sound like a true-believer Keynesian. As such I believe you are seriously misguided about programs like CfC; let me try and demonstrate, as simply as possible, why this sort of program produces nothing but a short-term gain that I believe actually makes the economy weaker in the long run.

Let's take a community where there are 10,000 people projected to buy new cars over the next 4 years, or about 2,500 cars per year. So the car dealerships and factories should be supplying 2,500 cars/year to meet the demand. X number of people work in the factories, Y in the dealerships, everything's reasonably balanced out.

Now the government steps in. 2,500 cars/year isn't good enough. $4500 (of state-borrowed money) for everyone who buys a new car this year, says Big Nanny State! 8,000 people rush to take advantage of the "free" money. The car factories and dealerships scale up to meet this new demand. More people working at the factories and dealerships! More cars sold! Record profits! New cars in every yard! Tax revenues up on all the work and sales! What a success! In year 1.

Now year 2 comes along. There are only 2,000 people left in the community who need a new car. Only about 700 will actually buy a car this year. But the factories & dealerships are all built up to supply 8,000. Now what happens? Supply greatly exceeds demand. The factories and dealerships lay people off. Some close outright. Sales plummet; we're talking a 90% year-over-year decline here! People out of work. Tax revenues crater. But that money the government borrowed to finance the program still needs to be paid back -- with interest. Kind of hard to do that now...

I don't consider myself a hard-core Austrian, but it makes way more sense to me than any of this Keynesian nonsense.

As for the overall consumer debt load, there's actually a chart on the Market Ticker blog I linked that shows its total amount. It is over 2.5 trillion dollars. How much has been paid back? About 50 billion. That's a drop in the bucket compared to what's out there. Hence why I say, getting that number down to something sustainable is going to take a long time, and it does not help in the least that just as the consumer is finally starting to de-leverage, the government is levering up at warp speed and playing "kick the can" with all the big banks, just like Japan did through the 90s.

One really gets the feeling the whole thing is a powder keg, just waiting for the spark to be lit.

No, this is not what's driving the recession. What's driving the recession is that the amount of debt in the economy, especially the American economy, has reached critical mass. You really need to start reading some blogs like The Market Ticker, Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis, and Zerohedge to get a true picture of what's going in the economy.

As for this particular "cash for clunkers" program, all it's doing is pulling forward demand for new vehicles. It will cause a short-term rise in demand now, but once the program expires or runs out of cash again, that demand will vanish and there will be nothing to replace it. Sales will have to return to their previous level or even go lower, as the people who buy new cars under this program certainly won't need to do so again for a few years.

At the macro level, all the debt in the system has produced a similar effect. All the demand, all the growth we've seen for years now, has been fuelled by debt. The debt just can't grow any more; everyone's maxxed out and now trying to pay it down. There's so much debt out there that clearing it out is going to be a long, painful process, and during that process we'll be lucky to stave off an outright market crash, let alone actually return to a growing economy.

From one of the other kids in the neighborhood, explaining to me why he swore. He used the example of dropping a hammer on his foot:

"So what am I going to say? (uses very proper-sounding tone of voice) Oh, look at this. I hurt my foot. Would someone please help me?

(switches back to normal voice) No! I'm gonna scream, Owww, goddammit, I dropped the fucking hammer on my fucking foot!

Then I feel better."

Correction: Canadians haven't done it. Not fully. Most people you talk to know their height in feet & inches, their weight in pounds. You buy butter by the pound (even though it's labeled 454g), buy screws, bolts, & wrenches in imperial units, paint by the gallon, etc.

It comes from having a southern neighbour who hasn't switched and being highly economically dependent on them.

Until the first Mac guy/PC guy ads come out targeting Windows 7, that is. I've got nothing empirical to back it up, but my gut feeling is that those ads really pushed Vista over the edge from "ehh, this really isn't so great" to "yeah that's that shitty Windows the Mac ads rip on all the time, keep away from it!"

I just did an Ubuntu install myself (finally migrating away from Mandriva after being less than impressed with their new release) and I did have to endure a multi-hour fight getting sound to work correctly. The problem seems to be Ubuntu's slipshod treatment of anything KDE-related. I had to plug in a lot of packages before I "unlocked" enough of KDE's settings to see that KDE was trying to send audio directly to the card instead of through PulseAudio. Finally after changing that, everything worked.

I don't understand why Ubuntu won't make at least a token effort to get KDE & GNOME to play together. It would go a long way to finishing the distro up. It is the one big thing I miss from Mandriva so far.

Physics do not care what the law says. Your 70kg "ugly bag of mostly water" versus 1000kg+ of steel, glass, and plastic is a losing battle every time. When you are near moving motor vehicles, pay attention and don't do anything stupid.

Case in point: Amarok 2. I was just getting to like Amarok 1.4. The musicbrainz tie-in was golden to me; I've got so many mistagged files downloaded and copied from various sources, that looking up all the tag info myself was downright painful. Enter Amarok 1.4, one mouse click, and the suggested tags are right there. I usually do a quick wiki lookup to double-check before I save, but still much faster than having to look through an entire discography manually.

Enter Amarok 2, which I tried today for the first (and last) time. Musicbrainz is ripped out. Why? "We're planning something better," say the devs. Any progress on it? Nope. Toss in a totally new, butt-ugly UI, loss of smart playlists, loss of wikipedia plug-in, loss of ipod support (!!!), loss of postgre support (though that one I can at least understand even if I don't like it) and you get an app that went from being a near-killer desktop app to useless garbage.

I thought it was just the KDE developers who went insane with the "blow everything up in a massive rewrite" mindset, but it seems to be infecting their apps, too :(.

All DS9 had to do, was make Worf look like a TOS-era Klingon, and have the other characters in the show not even notice the difference. Just exchange a couple of odd looks, perhaps coupled with a small joke along the lines of, "Did he cut his hair?" Then when they return to DS9's present, Worf is back to his fully-made-up self, and again, nobody sees the difference.

Much of the episode was played for humor in the first place, I don't know why they didn't go there for the Klingon make-up.