This would be a useful equation if it weren't for the fact that the person in question was a fuckwad long before the anonymity or audience came. The idea that a thoughtful, virtuous person somehow becomes a troll because of anonymity and an audience is bullshit. The only thing anonymity does is melt away the facade of civility a fuckwad has carefully crafted for themselves.

It is ironic, though it may be because the Big Media remakes and sequels are often so shitty that we geeks spend the remainder of our lives trying desperately to scrub their memories from our minds. For example, if Alien 3 and 4 had been as good as the first two I would be cool with a new one every few years until the end of time. Another issue is that people tend to think sequels and remakes come at the cost of the exclusion of new/original works. As if making Star Wars XIV somehow prevents someone else from making a Heinlein film.

They didn't. CBS or Paramount or whoever generally turns a blind eye to projects like these as long as they don't make any money. Other than the recent films (which arguably are only Star Trek in name), the franchise is dead. It's possible even that they're keeping an eye on how the public receives it in consideration of creating a new official television series. I think if there is to be a new series they should put it on HBO and go for broke. Good actors, good writers, the occasional full-frontal and beheading/gibbing will make for some unforgettable Trek, if nothing else.

Either they're still tolerable or you haven't been watching much television lately. There are a lot of good shows, but holy shit, the majority are pretty awful. I think of ToS more as on-screen theater than some gritty, brutally-realistic drama. It's like Shakespeare. You gotta watch it with a certain perspective and malleability in order to enjoy it.

Premise is largely irrelevant; it's more about the execution with special attention to commanding performances and excellent writing. The problem with Star Trek (and I've seen every episode of every incarnation and all the films) is that it's hit and miss with the acting and writing. I kinda like the premise, as most sci-fi is about "us" versus "them". The concept of exploration, the search for knowledge and the betterment of the human race and the galaxy as one large community is something everyone on this planet could take some lessons from. Star Trek is an allegory about our own struggles here on Earth.

That being said, I'd love to see more quality science fiction on television and film drawn from the works of our greatest authors.

I wish your post could be modded to +infinity, or perhaps there should be a "Holy fucking shit, chisel those words in stone in a national park somewhere" mod. Nicely said.

Banning things that people want leads to an increase in crime, and while you may say the only crime will be selling tobacco, for some reason criminals with no recourse for being wronged (since it's illegal) will take reprisal into their own hands. Prohibition created the mob. Making marijuana illegal created countless videos of narcos cutting necks and chainsawing people on meat hooks. Yes, lets make more shit people want illegal and see if it works.

Interesting point, although the debate regarding the difference between zero and 1/150,000,000 seems pointless when you begin to consider the odds of getting killed on any given day just walking outside your front door.

I think the lottery is a win in general. Yes, you have people who become addicted or can't afford to spend the money, but that's life. On the plus side a lot of people sincerely enjoy playing and much of the cash goes to public works and schools and such. It's practically an optional tax, and the idea of taxes being optional I find fantastic.

No, there's a new paper and THAT'S THE LAST WORD. Everyone update their recommendations and reprint their pamphlets, immediately! I think this is what Scott Adams was ranting about a few weeks ago. You're right, though, and one other thing that alcohol does even if drinking alone is to relax you, lift your spirits and get your mind off whatever stressful events actually are draining your life force. I appreciate people doing all this research, but they need to show a little humility. Hard work doesn't mean you're right.

In recent years I've been noticing this in a growing number of products. I'm not an engineer or QA person though as a programmer I may have better insight into design than most, but it seems everything from cars to coffee makers have one or more obvious, critical design flaws that somehow make it through every check at well-known companies and all the way to retail.

My only theories are that 1) People are getting more stupid generally, 2) QA departments are incompetent, 3) designers and engineers are incompetent, and 4) consumers are either apathetic or incapable of recognizing [in]effective design.

In any case, anyone else have any recent experiences with products making it to retail that anyone with basic AutoCAD experience and more than two brain cells should have caught prior to production? Perhaps there should be a wiki of really stupid shit designers/engineers should avoid when creating a product to save us all the pain.

In probably less than 50 years first-world countries and their poorer allies will have tools far more precise and forgiving than bombs for eliminating undesirables. Imagine land-based humanoid drones that from a distance or at night look and move convincingly as people whose mission is to apprehend enemies and only maim or kill as a last resort. Imagine air-based drones the size of an eagle firing small, guided rockets with a payload only large enough to kill their target but leave anyone standing next to them unscathed. Combine the current technique of dividing drone functionality between members of small teams (target acquisition, movement, etc.), the exponential increase in intelligence-gathering current trends indicate the future holds and the rapid development of smaller, nimbler robots with semi-autonomous systems and you have the perfect recipe for the precision engagement of distant enemies. The future will bring a redefinition of the word "drone" to include nearly everything a soldier or humanitarian worker could ever be asked to do and more.

So yes, the usual human issues will still exist (territorial disputes, religious differences sparking violence, dictators and warlords seeking power, illegal trafficking of whatever, etc.), but the ability of governments to shape and/or resolve them through force will be unrecognizable with respect to the casualties received and inflicted. For example, you can't execute a robot. Even if you do it in the most horrendous way possible, film it and post it on Twitter people will just laugh their asses off. Any weapon (such as a bomb) with a blast radius of more than a few feet is going to cause collateral damage. If a drone of a foreign power killed my dad because he just happened to be in the same area as a known terrorist I would be understandably upset. I probably wouldn't start burning people alive or anything batshit crazy like that, but I empathize with the anger some of these people feel. Granted, that is but one component of the extreme violence being committed by radical groups such as ISIS, but nevertheless human nature and the desire for retribution can't be erased by statements of how precise bombs are or that infants blasted apart in their homes are unfortunate accidents. I don't know if bombs kill more terrorists than they create, but there will be a better way to deal with them and with a little time many of us will see it in stunning 8K on the news channel of our choice.

To answer TFA's question, technically "Yes" in that it informs the public of a newsworthy event, though it's trash journalism in that it emotionalizes the issue through a depiction of violence atypical of what Fox News viewers are accustomed to witnessing on the channel. I think they did it for the lulz and ratings. I don't think it was wrong or un-newsworthy, just tasteless. Things like that shouldn't be shown on a channel not widely known for showing such things due to the static nature of television. You could have had your child in the room and flipped to the channel 1 second after the video started, for god's sake. Real asshole move, Fox (disclaimer, my HTPC serves all my needs; I have no cable/satellite).

About ten years ago I started getting into cooking and cuisine have enjoyed and benefited from it since. What I began to realize on this journey based on observations of my own changing tastes as well as the unchanging tastes of everyone around me is that most people (at least in the U.S.) actually have no idea what good food is. Apparently having a lot of fat, salt and sugar constitutes a good meal and the rest isn't important. Frozen dinners? Delicious! McDonalds burgers? More please! It is an education problem, because it takes a little work before your palate can tell the difference between something that's been frozen more than once and something that is fresh. Knowing what's in your food and how it's made is also pretty enlightening, as you'll be far more hesitant to put much of it in your mouth.

Considering the state of general health these days, I'm surprised the government hasn't forced culinary and food education classes on our kids yet. As much as I hate the government forcing anything on anyone, this would be an exception.

Were that somehow not a fact, we could hook obese people up to mile-high cylinders and we'd have a perpetual source of energy by harvesting the difference in energy between what they eat and what materializes out of thin air. Science has failed by not testing this, for certain.

If a doctor can find no medical reason why a person can't be vaccinated and they still choose not to be vaccinated then deport them. The creepiness of the government strapping you down screaming while they put needles in your arm (excluding executions) will be avoided, as will a bunch of diseased idiots walking around infecting the population like a pack of starving zombies. And you'll still have a choice.

Good point, although it would be useful for launching probes and such.