Yup. Geeks are the vast minority. People are happy with "good enough ". As mentioned elsewhere, the problem is the writing, and to be more accurate, which writers get the money. When you write a series proposal or bible, you damned well better have a phrase near the beginning along the lines of "think Battlestar Galactica meets The Smurfs " if you want to get green lit. Producers want a known entity that will guarantee profit, not something unknown or "new" that might challenge an audience. Or, god forbid, might take more than 4 episodes to be in the top 20.

But as a reality check, pointing out poor television is like shooting fish in a barrell. There's *always* been crap on tv. As far as quality shows, there's never been more amazing stuff on television, perhaps the early experimental days excepted. Boardwalk Empire, Mad Men, American Horror Story (by the guys that did Glee, no less!), despite your personal opinion on these and other shows, they are quality stuff. The issue is the technology has created a world where it's insanely inexpensive to generate fodder about real life teen moms and fat people losing weight and delivering it to your living room for pennies a day (as part of a larger subscription package, of course). So, in a way, technology enabled this in the first place. That doesn't mean he's right, though, tv is broken, and will break further while the internet allows people to watch and pay for just what they want, when they want it. The current model can't hold up, and in fact networking the tv experience might just be a great thing for whatever tv evolves into. You will want that word of mouth information, from consumers like yourself, to guide your habits, just like I wouldn't dream of buying a coffeemaker without some googling first.

...and there's nothing wrong with that. The point to me wasn't so much about 'who was better or more influential', it was clearly about the fact that mass media was utterly swamped, to the point of nausea on my part anyway, with Jobs 'retrospectives' and commentaries. Celebrating that this other man who so recently passed was in many ways more influential on the 'guts' of IT, ostensibly what the readers on slashdot would care more about, is neither disrespectful to Jobs or out of place in any way.

I thought all this was solved over a decade ago? The odd circumstances(incredibly high localized heat, feet and lower legs frequently unburned, the oily smoke on the ceiling but the room not properly catching fire, etc) was easily duplicated with dead animals and essentially showed that despite the water content in a mammal, it's the *fat* that acts as a fuel source. Essentially, the body behaves as a slow burning candle, with bones or other materials as the wick. All that's odd here is the ignition source, all the 'spooky and unexplained trappings' are good science. In the past, stoves, fireplaces, cancer sticks and other natural oddities such as sparks from a distant fire landing on someone who had recently or was in the process of dying was all you needed to take away the Geraldo angle and just make it a tragic story.

So the examiner failed to find a combustion source - stranger things happen on Castle every week errr...

This is more about whiney, cheap internet bitching than a serious business discussion. Just look at the games industry, it's like movies or writing - you invest years of blood and sweat and either you come out the other end virtually bankrupt (most common), or you rarely get a hit and actually get a decent profit. This doesn't mean the monster distributors don't gobble up much of it, but then without them, you're highly unlikely to be a hit. The Minecrafts are the exception to the rule.

Interesting? I find his alterations really sad. Not because he's 'toying with my past', because *nothing* will replace my lining up in the sun 15 times to see that movie in all it's pre-THX, hair and scratch covered glory, that's covered with the patina of nostalgia. Nope, that's dead and gone, along with my first kiss, the first getting dumped and all the other hazy experiences from my youth. I find it sad because it betrays a cynical view on the stupidity of the audience. All these changes were done to 'clarify', to communicate his thinking to the audience.

A classic example for me was Han chasing the stormtroopers on the Death Star, running like a madman, then bursting into a room full of them, turning around and running the other way. A nice Bugs Bunny moment, and I vividly remember seeing that for the first time. *Everyone* in the theatre got it. Yes, it was obvious there was barely a few more than the original group being chased, time/money must have been an issue, but we got it. Future generations, however, getting stupider by the year, need help. Or perhaps Lucas, with his endless yes men circling around him while he navel gazes, just wants the future to remember that he 'nailed it the first time', I don't know. But now there's at least a hundred troopers crammed idiotically in a room for no possible reason other than a narrow view from a door showing 'lots'. Because you see, he was chasing just a few, and now he's run into...

See, that's sad. Maybe my Bugs reference wasn't the best, but least Warner Brothers stuck to cleaning up the re-release picture and audio, for the most part. Lucas seems to think people are getting stupider. Cue chorus of agreement...

Agreed. My wife and I have a bunch of gadgets, couple of nexus phones, xoom, and we use them constantly. My kindle, however, is my 'book'. Different tech, different use. Sure, I can and do read on a light emitting screen, but long hours reading print needs e-ink.