In large part, I think Harrison Ford really carried the first trilogy. After I'd learned that Ford improvised a number of his lines, I watched the trilogy again and noticed just how wooden and dead nearly all of the other characters in the movies were.

I do think that this trilogy stands a much better chance as long as Lucas isn't writing the dialog. He's okay, I think, as far as overall plot is concerned. But dialog and characters really aren't his strong suit.

As for Abrams, his main problem, it seems to me, is that he seems to focus a bit over-much on action sequences. But Star Wars works pretty well with that, so I'm not too concerned. I think it might work fairly well.

Why not? Right now Tesla has far more demand for their cars than they can fill. The reason why they're in the red is because they're building their manufacturing capacity so rapidly.

Who do you think Obamacare is paying off? Are you making allusion to the fact that Obama's campaign had a very broad funding strategy, so that Obama is "paying off" the general populace?

This is precisely why header compression is so useful.

Loading this page, for example, I see 93 separate requests, dozens of which are less than few kilobytes. And while there are a number of different domains, there are quite a few requests that share the same domain. I imagine that having only one connection per domain, instead of one connection per request, would reduce the number of connections by a factor of five or more (I'm not taking the time to look through and count nearly a hundred requests).

So yes, I do think that header compression is likely to be very useful. And combining header compression with allowing one connection for a batch of requests will give web developers quite a lot more flexibility in how they structure their websites.

Google Glass, at present, is not intended for consumers. It's intended for developers. They're basically trying to get the app ecosystem up and running before a consumer-friendly version of the product is released.

I fully expect that consumer versions of the product will typically cost less than $600 around launch time, for the simple reason that I don't think they can expect a significant quantity of sales unless they get the price that low.

This is not the issue. The problem is that climate change denialists don't question honestly. They lie. They fabricate data. They ignore other data. And, by and large, are bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry.

Science is settled in the sense that we know climate change is happening, and humans are causing it, not because of any sort of dogma, but because the evidence is so strong. If the deniers actually engaged in reasoned debate, scientists wouldn't be so incensed.

It is pretty great PR. But unfortunately it seems to be a pretty crappy movie, which blunts my enthusiasm for watching it.

I'd also add that even if this research is valid, and even if stopping the action of this protein reduces skin aging in humans, there is a very good chance that the protein does other things that are quite important for health. It's conceivable, for instance, that you might have great skin, but a weakened immune system or have your digestion of certain important nutrients stunted. So even if there's no fraud, there's a lot of reason to remain skeptical.

I'm skeptical that there's actual evidence of severe adverse reactions (aside from the occasional allergic reaction). "I had a vaccine and then this bad thing happened to me," is not an indication that the vaccine caused the bad thing. It might have, but the severe reactions have been so incredibly rare that there's really no evidence of a causal link, as near as I can tell.

But what you are asking for here is a far, far higher barrier to obtaining a vaccination than is asked for for most any other medical procedure or remedy. The real information is, "This will protect your child, and the population as a whole, from serious diseases. It most likely won't cause any issues. Your child may have minor cold symptoms for a bit, which means the vaccine is working."

The CDC's page is informative here: http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/va...

Note that under the "severe" reactions is usually the disclaimer that they can't actually be sure this reaction is caused by the vaccine. I'd be willing to bet that disclaimer should really be expanded to encompass every vaccine on the list, aside from the allergic reactions.

Well, right. A rehabilitation-based system needs a whole supportive infrastructure for it to work well. In this instance, you'd want there to be regularly-collected data on recidivism that is provided as feedback to rehabilitation centers so that they have the data they need to evaluate their release criteria. We'd also have to eliminate all for-profit prisons, and adequately fund the prisons that remain (I don't think they should be considered prisons at all, but whatever they are, they would need adequate funding).

Getting rid of non-crimes such as personal, non-reckless drug use would also be a huge benefit for everybody.

His profession is intellectual. Demonstrating extreme intellectual dishonesty is absolutely a valid disqualification for working in an intellectual field. Hurting people in the process by promulgating racist bullshit is a good reason as well.

Also, he wasn't a scholar that studied the fields relevant to his reality-free claims. So literally everybody who posts in this thread is just as qualified as he is to talk about race (and I'm sure many are more qualified).

Finally, arguments matter more than qualifications, and his arguments were absolute dreck. I know people who have yet to graduate from high school who are far more knowledgeable about race than this douche canoe.

Nit: there are at least 10^22 stars in the visible universe (approx. 10^11 stars per galaxy, 10^11 galaxies). So there are far more stars than links in our brains. Our galaxy has somewhere around a hundred billion stars, though, so we've got more links than stars in the galaxy. But not the universe.

And this is precisely why the police in the US are little more than armed, bullying thugs who suppress minorities and extort money (see: civil forfeiture).

That might be a meaningful reply if the book was, "Barbie: I Can Be a Manager". It isn't, so you're just pulling bullshit rationalizations out of thin air to justify some rather disgusting sexism.

Er, what? She doesn't employ anybody. She has a class project, gets a couple of boys to do her work for her, and takes the credit. There's nothing about this that is flattering for Barbie or women.

If you're going to say that people who want to be offended will be, you should at least not create a straw-man of peoples' actual complaints.