In fact the entire movie reminded me of an elevator episode from a TV series. These episodes are made when on has blown one's budget for the season, but still need to get 24 in the can. So you have everyone stuck on an elevator, or locked in a room, or the like, and have some dramatic events happening. Of course it is hard to carry an entire movie on this premise, but when one has promised a mini series, one has to deliver.
We are talking a movie that has a lot of hype, but may not last past the first weekend. A lot of people were planning on seeing it, but are people going to make a statement and risk some lone gun nut coming in and killing several people
Is it commercially responsible to pay for the distribution of a film when people may be afraid of the consequences of seeing it? Might it be more commercially responsible to release it when the heat dies down. Are parents going to allow their kids to see this movie know a lone gun nut might kill them?
Again, we really don't know what is going on here. Team America already killed this guy in the movies, and made fun of him in the most racist of ways(I so ronery). But this is just a movie. It's purpose is to generate revenue for sony. It is not an 'film' so it's sole purpose is to generate revenue for Sony. It has some hype, but it also has some risk. Again, not of movie theaters being bombed, but of someone, who does not necessarily have and national backing, coming in with tactical shotguns and 100 round rifles and killing several people. This is not that hard to imagine as it happens with some regularity.
The taxi service in my area has had tracking of the cabs for a while and the ability to get a cab with an app for a very long while. The wait on the phone is not long at all. I am not in an area where cabs are used a lot, but sometimes a cab is better than a bus or driving.
I specifically use cabs because of lack of surge pricing. There have been times when I have had to get home at midnight, and it good that i can just take a cab and not get gouged. If one want to show appreciation, tip better.
In some ways I see these ride buying service as Walmart. Come in, chage less to drive out others, then raise the prices and the consumer is at the mercy of an unregulated monopoly.
Second, most writers still use the novel format, which is around 400 years old in it's current format. This is different from older western forms, which tended to be more spoken word, such as Beowulf You can still buy 400 year old novels such Don Quixote. I would suspect that if one were doing something new, then moving from the novel format, or at least messing with it as Kurt Vonnegut did, would be the minimal requirement.
Third, the world has changed significantly in 500 years, but if one reads the old works we still identify the humans as humans and understand the motivation. Yes, most of us would die quickly because we did not bow down to the king, or because we helped a slave escape, or because we did not know to avoid the emptying of chamber pot, but I think the reason to read literature is to learn that we are not all that removed from our forebears.
And fourth, in this brave new world no one can make an author throw away 50 pages of work. If one thinks they through away 50 good pages, then that is a matter of one's own integrity, nothing else. Write the book you want to write, publish it, slip it into bookstore, no one is stopping you. If one is willing to give up one's artistic integrity for greed and actually sell books, then that is something different.
Science fiction helps us explore our relationship with the technology that allows us to amplify our creative abilities. It is different from fantasy that allows us to imagine a world where the rules are different. Imagining a different culture is not that useful because the world that is going to interact with the technology is our present culture. We do not live in a world that everyone, all of the sudden, is going to accept that their way of life is obsolete and immediately embrace new ideas.
I would also suggest that the spectrum has to be used and sold to the public as a competitive product. If not the lease has to be forfeited and the firm or it subsidiaries cannot big on it again for one cycle.
Given the way the Aero case went, where the public was not allowed to access the public airwaves through leased equipment, I would like to see the TV stations be subject to the same rules. Pay for the spectrum they use. If they are going to claim that the public cannot access the public spectrum without payment, then let the broadcast stations pay as well. Honestly, they no longer serve a public interest.
For the past 40 years TNR has apparently been owned by a incredibly bigoted person who used the liberal credibility of the magazine to push his white supremacists ideas. Certainly these ideals are accepted in some circles, but not the target audience of the TNR. As a new generation who was not raised on overt bigotry came into being, a generation that pretty uniformly saw the assassination of MLK through history books, not newscasts, and were not raised on magazine subscriptions, the new century saw the circulation of the new republic cut in half. The white supremacy could no longer be covered with the inertia of the respect of the magazine.
In this way we see the problems of TNR firmly rooted in old ideas and the destruction of the brand by the previous owner. If the brand is to be rehabilitated it is going to require the jettison of the previous ideas that are not consistent with far left ideology, and those who think that white supremacy is consistent with anything real in the US were free to leave with the editors.
TNR is only going to be saved by re branding as an online source of liberal news and analysis. While the editors did not promote any kind of white supremacy, they were complicit in the past, and that may have been a problem in the present.
Tie fighter over water was just them playing with special effects. Very gratuitous.
Guards on the light saber was definitely the silliest addition.
That said the error might not have been prevented with LaTex. If it was a conversion error from different versions of word, in which a comment was exposed, that might have been prevented. If it was a human error, a comment accidently exposed in the editing process, that is easier to do with LaTex.
In any case this likely has little to do with the process, and much to do with the technology. A typesetter would never copy marginal notes left in the draft, or would check. Also, things like twitter makes it easy and cheap for such trivial mistakes to be amplified to 15 minutes of fame.
The moon is made of green cheese. -- John Heywood