Terra Nova does not have a reasonable budget. It used about $16 mil for the pilot, and about $5mil for any subsequent episode, which is higher than the network TV average of $3mil.

I agree. SGU's acting way good, with Robert Carlyle, David Blue and the guy who played Greer being a step ahead of everyone else. Overall, acting was good. Only the female actors needed to step it up.

Indeed. He made Babylon 5 for a $600,000 per episode. Which is amazing, even if you count inflation.

Actually, SGU at $2.5mil was cheap. Maybe not as cheap as SyFy wanted it to be, but it's cheaper than the average US show, which costs $3mil per episode these days. And that's the average price. Some network shows go up to $4 mil per episode. Cable shows are usually cheaper. "Mad Men" costs $2.5mil per episode too btw (started at $2.3mil in 2008 according to NYTimes).

Here's a screenshot from the said SGU episode: http://i.gateworld.net//gallery/albums/uni_season2/207-TheGreaterGood/screencaps/sgu_207_0205.jpg

The Canadian-made SGU had movie-grade FX on a TV budget (it cost $2.5mil per episode according to Robert Carlyle, the main actor on the show). SGU's FX were the best ever on TV (so far). Just check on Netflix "The Greater Good" episode to see the amount of detail and craftsmanship that went on the FX. But I think Lucas' problem is that he wants to do the FX via ILM, which is an expensive company to work with, even if he owns it. The answer is to go off shore for FX. Either Canada, or even South America.

Fully agreed. All the elderly family I have in Greece have feature phones, but they learn by habit: press some numbers, press the green button, then the red. Nothing else. They don't even know how to program their TV, someone else has to set it up for them the first time, and then they remember by habit that button with a 3 on it, is "News channel", for example. They don't want to learn how things really work. I tried. I tried with my mom, I tried to explain her the logic, but she prefers to write down on a paper which button does what, and then press these blindly, without understanding what's really going on.

So the problem really is "I don't want to learn", not that iOS is too difficult to use. Especially iOS, is not.

Epirus in Greece, where I'm coming from, is a quake zone btw, we have "feel-able" earthquakes regularly there (at least once or twice a year). The biggest ones, where people died, were in 2004, and then back in 1981.

In my mother country, Greece, we have a word for this: koufovrasi. Supposedly (or so the superstition goes), a few hours before an earthquake, the weather becomes hot, stale, like you're choking, and it's like the sound doesn't travel as much (that's why it's called as such, which in free translation it means "deaf, boiled weather"). In the villages of the mountain Epirus, this is a known "sign" that an earthquake might hit soon. I personally experienced this kind of weather once or twice during in my early life there, but I don't remember if an earthquake ever hit soon afterward or not.

No, you're using the wrong update button. Not the one for ALL apps, but in each app's page. So when you try to update apps one by one, this doesn't work anymore.

This does not work here, for two different devices, and if you read the article, you will see that there are many people who can't. There are many threads about it. If you can, you're special.

Apple needs to be a bit more carefully about older versions of the OS and models. Case in point:

1. This: http://www.osnews.com/story/24428/The_Next_Brick_to_Decorate_Your_Wall_iOS_3_x_Devices
After months this article got posted, the App Store STILL DOES NOT work properly. You still can't update an app from within the device by hitting "update". The button does nothing! You need iOS 4.x or above before you can update via iOS (so we now have to use iTunes, which I don't want to use since that iPod has no music in it, I just use it as a PDA).

2. Apple REMOVED AirTunes support from iOS 4 when the second generation of AppleTV came out. What they did exactly was to stop supporting the original AppleTV (that was still sold at the time), from within iOS. So I can't use the 1st Gen AppleTV to send audio too from my iOS device anymore. This used to work just fine up to a few months ago. After the iOS 4.2 update, the support was removed.

While parts of technology might stop progressing as fast, other parts of technology will start getting optimized, to get over the halting of that other part. So if hardware stops getting faster, people will start optimizing software (which is currently extremely inefficient), until we get a better HW/SW tech at some point later in the future. There's a very nice comment on the Amazon page of the book by JPS, give it a read.