I haven't looked at beta in a while... does it still have the pointless generic stock photos on every story?

I bet you were a hit at parties in the late 80s when it came time to debate the relative merits of Captains Picard and Kirk. ;-)

Seriously, though, you have a point.

Yeah, it will be great to get the experience of 30 seconds of hourglass every time you click on an e-mail on your phone.

I feel like I'm living in bizzarroland, where the shittiest, most customer-hostile companies are somehow the most profitable.

I can't remember when it wasn't like this.

Yeah, like anyone can actually read and understand OpenSSL. Perhaps it would get studied more if someone entered it into next year's IOCCC.

Whoosh?

Just as an exercise, imagine the original star wars movies without the spaceships and you'll know what i mean.

Do you mean this?

A lot of people say that having seen the movies as an adult they don't hold up as well as when they saw them as kids. Does "Star Wars" affect me the same as an adult as it did when I was 12? No, but I still think it's a fine movie. However, my opinion of "Empire" has increased significantly since I first saw it with my Dad in the theater.

Lucas is a visionary. He sucks at the details. He set out to recreate the Saturday morning serials with "Star Wars" and was very successful in setting a new bar in special effects. His vision for the scope and scale of the movie, the simplicity of the characters, being mythical archetypes, perfectly fit what he was shooting for, and made for a fun and exciting movie. But he can't write dialog to save his life. Even the dialog in "Star Wars" wasn't great, and in the sequels, it was awful. He also cannot direct people, because everyone in the prequels looked like awful actors, even though they aren't.

But he's got the vision, an eye for the kind of spectacle that makes great movies, and should be recognized as such. The problem was when he was allowed to also do those things he was really awful at.

I rewatched the original trilogy as an adult (I was a teenager when they came out) and still felt the first and third were pretty good, and yes, nostalgia plays a part of that, but my opinion of "The Empire Strikes Back" improved significantly. I like it much more now than when I first saw it.

I thought JJTrek was almost, but not quite as bad as Bayformers. There were fewer grotesque continuity errors and no (as far as I can remember) testicle jokes, and the action wasn't so much of a confusing mess, but the Trek reboot movies were just as stupid and incoherent.

But in the case of Android, I don't believe that is primarily Google's fault, short of requiring OEMs to provide an upgrade path, and I think the logistics of that would be difficult... how many upgrades? how long to support? Yes, some OEMs are idiots, but that's nothing new.

Windows RT was solely Microsoft's bad idea.

You're right, except for the fact that no one (outside of Microsoft anyway) ever expected RT to succeed in the first place. The wisdom of the masses can often be wrong, but this one was a gimmee. It's the same thing with Metro on the desktop. No one liked it. It was almost universally panned from the first moment people got a chance to see what it was, but MS doubled down on the bad idea. Now they are backpedalling on it in Windows 9^h 10 (but of course, not eliminating the need for it on the desktop which would be the proper solution).

Of course there's no utopian society, and I don't believe there ever will be. But that doesn't mean it isn't interesting to consider what one might look like, how it would work and what challenges it would face. If you're trying to argue Star Trek wasn't perfect, well of course it wasn't. But it was a worthwhile example of speculative fiction that raised and considered interesting questions. Besides, the Federation is supposed to be the utopia, but that doesn't mean all races in the galaxy are. I think the development and fleshing out of the Klingons as a realistic society over the course of TNG was one of the best parts of Star Trek.

Also, if you're not "supposed" to know, then why did you comment like you did know? I bet you're a hoot to talk politics with.

Wait do they have balls?

If Michael Bay had done the Star Wars prequels...