Spot-on about the whole slave on Tatooine thing.

Lucas managed to take something like grinding slavery and make me forget that this could be a reason why Anakin had a chip on his shoulder.

I mean, Anakin just seemed like some poor kid who got to have fun building his own robot. Lucas probably meant us to think that this is an exceptional thing: "How can this slave build a full-on droid while being a slave????" What I got from it was actually, "Yeah, Anakin is kind of a slave I guess, but he gets great Christmas presents."

I swear that if they switched up that part of Episode 1 introducing Anakin with the beginning of Conan the Barbarian, Darth Vader would have made a shitload more sense as someone who had been a survivor of slavery, while still being someone who could still become something like a hero, albeit with the chance of falling to the dark side due to just the shitty, shitty life he started with.

That's probably the point. There was a set up to nothing. Nobody, including the writers, had any idea what Lost was supposed to be about.

And that is the clever metagame with a show called Lost.

"Hey JJ, they're still watching a show about nothing! Get Seinfeld on the phone to collect on your bet that we couldn't pull that act twice on the TV watching population"

Enterprise evolved in some senses from Voyager, but it evolved in removing those parts of Trek that I cared to see. Voyager went wrong, horribly wrong, but if someone had taken a firm hold of that series and turned it around, Voyager really could have been the exploration series that really took Trek boldly where no man had gone before.

Unfortunately they took the worst parts of Voyager, bolted on some stuff, and boldly went where Trek had already gone before.

Hey everyone! Let's rediscover the Klingons!

Boring. And I was sort of interested in that time period of Trek, even. Still boring.

And the time travel. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Stop, just stop.

Did Enterprise use all of the fan feedback from Voyager, and then use that as a model for the stuff that they would do the opposite of? "They don't want time travel? Let's make turn vast segments of the show in to a Temporal Cold War! What a great idea!"

And fighting against like 30th Century people who can screw with the timeline in your gimpy-ass starship and winning.

I'm sure that there is a lot of hard work, skill, and training that goes into being a TV producer that I don't have, but how the fuck does someone keep pushing the same ridiculous types of stories over and over, when they know how badly it went the last time they did it?

Sorry, but while TOS did do a lot of exploring philosophy and some groundbreaking stuff, it was full of glorious almost campy action throughout. That's because Roddenberry actually hadn't forgotten what audiences wanted to see on TV.

TNG was preachy at the beginning and then they fixed it. TNG was never horrible, but the first season was sort of blah and I think it only really made it because "ZOMG HOLY SHIT WE HAVE TREK BACK AND PATRICK STEWART AND THE ENTERPRISE-D, FUCK YEAH!"

The thing that comes closest to a philosophical masterpiece of Trek is probably the snoozefest that is TMP. Trek's answer to 2001, only not really.

Kirk punched people out and had sex with green slave girls. The only thing that the new Trek got wrong about all that is that their portrayal of sex was presented stylistically as fan service, and they made Kirk into a frat boy instead of a red-blooded macho hero-type.

To be fair, it was always made 100% clear that the Expanded Universe could go that way. They basically turned on its ear whatever people were thinking about the Clone Wars with the prequels, so its not like trashing EU stuff is unprecedented.

And while shitcanning the EU does trash many good stories, but it also trashes some ridiculous crap too.

I did hear that they are probably going to work some of what is now in "Legends" back into the canon by linking to some of it in the new movies. Its probably not going to restore anything like full stories, but they could throw in Thrawn references in the movies and such to make him canon.

The new movie has the original characters as much older, so that's well after the Thrawn stories and Dark Empire and a bunch of other things.

It may not be so bad. (Famous last words, I know...)

I wasn't suggesting that it was a viable option, I was just contrasting politics with what you can do with the IETF, which is an engineering task force based on running code.

Point is, even if we accept AGW is there and is a problem, it still doesn't tell us how we're going to fix it, and what impacts the fixes will have on us. If a "fix" ends up causing unrest, or a depression, you could end up with wars that might accelerate the process, instead of correcting it.

At least if you have code, it works and/or performs in relatively rapid time or not. We don't have that luxury with politics.

Arrogance and intelligence are not positively correlated traits, no matter how much the arrogant people would like to think they are.

I can't figure out if you're trolling or not.

Yes, Roddenberry probably did say it was not a military. We could also pass a law that says the US Army isn't a military.

However, unless they remove its armed mission enforcing policy on behalf of the government using rules of engagement and undertaking operations which are not limited to internal police activities such as self-defense and criminal apprehension, the US Army is still a military.

Starfleet may not be an "official" military, but they clearly were more than a police force, or explorers.

Roddenberry was great at some things, but when it came to explaining how his utopia actually function, and how Starfleet acts like a military, and is equipped like a military, and undertakes military missions, but still *isn't* a military is just him hand waving away inconsistencies.

If Starfleet can go toe to toe with dedicated warrior states like the Klingons and come out on top, you can't tell me that they don't have extensive military training. Even if their primary mission is exploration and science.

The thing you are missing is that "running code" is an objective goal which can be tested fairly easily.

Most policy decisions don't have such absolute and immediate feedback.

If there was a simulation that not only tested warming, but also provided accurate modelling about what exactly might be causing it, and most importantly, the outcomes of various policy decisions that could be taken to alleviate the issue, you might then be able to more closely compare an engineering task force with national and international politics.

What many AGW advocates miss in the policy debate is that they are often bundling the science with specific policy statements that are related, but not always directly required to reduce warming. So it sounds to others like they are saying:

"You all have to accept a full "progressive" slate of environmental restrictions or otherwise you are against science"

I think that the other end is responding in a knee jerk way to those comments.

I'm willing to accept that warming is something that exists and is likely affected by man. What I am not going to do is vote for the Green Party or even the Democratic Party just because of that, because they trail their own baggage and policy add-ons despite their much better position on the science of AGW.

It helps if you can listen to the engine and really get a good idea how it is running. It was part of troubleshooting before the computers.

People want to feel in tune with what they are using, and sound helps with that. I'll grant that power doesn't have to be loud, and shouldn't be obnoxious in any case, but I can understand that it gives many people more of a connection to their vehicle.

I think that people will get over it, but it will be the end of an era.

Agreed. There were no references to cars anywhere in that analogy.

If I've been using a piece of hardware from the 1980s and it still works perfectly for me, and it costs little or nothing at all to maintain it in the current kernel, I don't see why you wouldn't.

At some point, there will be a reckoning where they have to make a big change and the EISA stuff will not be reasonable to maintain any more. Until then, there's no reason to remove it just for the sake of "it's old". I presume once that point comes, Linus will ruthlessly shut down anyone who wants to keep it.

They actually have all the authority they want to declare it a hoax or not. The question is, what effect does that declaration have?

Congress as the legislative branch cannot make unconstitutional laws, but as long as they are not unconstitutional, they can create any law they want. And they can enforce it to the extent that they can get the Executive branch to do so. Which is usually where the silliness stops, unless the Executive branch is in collusion on the ridiculousness.

The legislative branches of sovereign states are not limited to legislating just inside their borders for their own citizens or even for for real things. They can pass any law they want, they are just practically limited to what power they have to enforce that law. They are not, however, subordinate to any higher authority.

If you put aside a deity, Congress is actually competent to legislate for the entire universe and can legally change the definition and content of all physical laws. But then again, so can the Russian Duma or the British Parliament, or whatever goes for a legislative branch in North Korea (which explains certain superpowers of Kim Jong Un).

If you can redefine two people having consensual sex as rape, you can certainly redefine accepted scientific theory as a hoax.

Climate scientists are hereby guilty of the crime of "statutory hoax". It's like a hoax, only the opposite.

Obama will veto the bill anyway, so its all a wash anyway... except for the grandstanding.

The Republicans know Obama will veto it, but they want him to have to do it. And the Democrats know the Republicans will pass the bill, so they just want to force them to go on record to state something to get a dig in on them as well. Net result? No Keystone XL pipeline. Effort required for negative result? Years.

They need to do away with the rules that allow off-topic amendments. Congress takes too long to act as it is without it adding bullshit amendments to every bill to make a point, or worse, to add riders that completely subvert the bill or even add completely unrelated stuff.

It's tough enough to get transparency on things in DC without them adding amendments simply so that you look bad for voting for something that neither you nor your constituents want just to get a more important change through.

I think we need to break this down.

Having a business go under is an incredibly shitty thing. You do want to avoid that, if you can.

The problem is not that these businesses still exist, it's that the people who ran those businesses had no negative impact for running those businesses _badly_. Therefore, bad management and short term thinking is rewarded.

If there is a structural problem with those businesses, or their product is no longer needed (like buggy whips), I can understand letting them go under. For everything else, it is almost always who is running the business, as opposed to the business itself, which is the problem.