Let's everybody calm down. Nearly all drama follows a very small set of dramatic structures. Just like there are one act plays, movies tend to follow a three act structure. That's all this book is.

Just because there is a structure does not mean it's all derivative. The idea is that the story lives on top of the structure. It isn't the structure itself. I see people citing movies like "Back to the Future" as examples that do not follow this structure. It does. Almost everything does. I took classes at one of these types of places for about two years. One thing we used to do was analyze films and try to find their structure. Amazingly, even the most seemingly unstructured movies followed the three act structure. There are exceptions, but they are rare. One notable exception might be the movie "I am curious yellow." But it's also highly experimental.

Or to put it another way: structure is the bones, story is the skin.

Yeah, fuck off to YOU dude. Things aren't so black and white and you need to learn to have a little compassion for your fellow man. You SHOULD be mad, but you are mad at the wrong people. Be mad at the people who ordered these soldiers here. Be mad at the people who use our military as an instrument of not defense but for maintaining control of this capitalist hellhole machine we all live in.

I see that no one replied to your comment but I wanted you to know that I read your whole comment and, for whatever it's worth, I wish you the best. I'm sorry that shit is fucked up for you, I really am. It makes me want to puke when I see those "support the troops" stickers -- support them until they get home, that is it seems. For seriously, hang in there. Take whatever you have and get in your car and move to the nearest big city and start over. Use your GI bill to get into the medical field. There will be more opportunities there.

It's way easier to use --- I hate signing up for stuff, and it doesn't do any annoying spamy stuff like instapaper does. Check it: http://www.rekindle.it/

Seriously. However cool it may be, humans weren't meant to live this way... All packed on top of each other, so tightly that moving around one another is no longer possible to do with just a human brain... It's just badness, all the way down. In nature, overpopulation is naturally corrected for. Humans, ever so smart, are always finding ways to stick yet another finger in the proverbial dam. It's a beautiful piece of art in that it is totally, and utterly terrifying.

Books are totally awesome but have one fatal design flaw: they tend to burn. Burning of the library of alexandria anyone?

Let's face it. If the shit goes down we're f*cked either way. As someone else pointed out -- something like a book is useless when you're freezing your ass off. And it will most likely end up being used to start fires. Why not enjoy the life we have?

What do you think they store the source of the dictionary on? I doubt they retype the while dictionary when they do a new edition.

You have a file that's 10 years old but copy it from hard drive to hard drive? No backups? Way to walk on the razor's edge ;)

The FDA approves drugs. The FCC approves electronics. Point is that widespread utilities like this should go through some sort of validation process. I'm not saying it should be apple, but it should be SOMEONE.

Running any application on your phone from untrusted sources produces unexpected results. Clip at 11.

Why I drive drunk so well? I'm an ultra-mega-super tasker!

Yes, except we are glossing over the part where you use a tool to "create" the application. Flash is a format AND an authoring tool. Unless Flash starts somehow exporting HTML 5, I don't really see this happening.

Come on. It's bad enough that we can't get simple block elements to render consistently in all browsers, and how we're going to try to build RIAs in "pure HTML?" Sure, it'll work for video content. Anything more complicated? Let me know how that turns out.

Flash's biggest strength is that the Flash player is responsible for running it and therefore is consistent across all platforms. If you ask me, this is a huge clusterfuck waiting to happen.