Jackson ends up telling NO story - just a vomit of computer-guided coloured lights. Sound and fury, signifying nothing...

I was more worried about replenishing Red Vines, than seeing what happened next.

As a result, the money is stolen not from the customers, but from the bank itself.

"Party on, Garth."

Bizarre argumentation. One hardly knows where to begin with your assumptions and red-herring analogies.

To address your first point - with it's ill-considered implications of parity between democracy, capitalism and actual worth or value: Commercial success at this scale simply indicate how thoroughly that vulgarity and thoughtlessness have been cultivated and encouraged by this media-driven culture over the past 90-100 years or so.

When people make "free choices" in such a society, they do so in appalling ignorance, with a maximum of empty stimulation. This is the post-Edward Bernays world.

The vulgarity of this decadent age. So? He rapes the corpse of JRR Tolkien and that's just fine if it earns a bauble and a penny?

That was a case of "resource constraint".

Exactly.

I AM one of those "small musicians and authors".

What matters is not if an app can tell where you are in the store, but if and when the app shares that information with a server. I don't care what information an application collects, if the data stays in-app.

Of course the great likelihood is that an app that collects that information will probably send that to a server, at the very least to query for specifics around you... but a smart app developer could provide a privacy option for users while still gaining benefit from iBeacons and the like.

Because as everybody knows, all Apple employees are special little snowflakes whose precious little lives

They are human beings who deserve a break from a rough work schedule, and again what is even the point of serving Sony's 11th hour demands when a release next week has essentially the same effect? Are you truly so daft as to imagine the physical act of release means anything next to the symbolic act of simply saying the release will go ahead?

I somehow get the sense you are that daft, and perhaps far dafter than can be discerned at first glance... I'll let you have the last response as you are quite simply batshit insane and not worthy of further correspondence.

Yeah, what the hell is this, HackerNews? :-)

Because if they don't, they will be viewed as cowards?

How so when it will simply come out next week. Sony already owns Coward, the other companies will put up the movie as soon as they can.

Anyway, you exaggerate the level of effort required by Apple to do the right thing.

In my world the "right thing" is not to have an Apple Employee have to take even TWO HOURS the day before Christmas to serve Sony's fickle whims.

Here's some real Tough Love - sometimes people on vacation should get to stay on vacation. THAT is the Right Thing.

"Bad planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my partâ

Why should Apple make people work Christmas (most core Apple employees have the week off) because Sony finally came around to the ethical course of action? Sounds like a great thing to have decided WEEKS AGO.

The big thing that is worse, I think, is economic inequality,

If everything is getter better in terms of quality of life, and economic inequality is growing, then how can you EI as bad?

At the very least it's not bad enough to matter.

You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it does....

It's actually a tragedy and missed opportunity, that Jackson has so little talent as a director, and so little discipline in telling a story.

I was appalled by how little he regarded the audience - and proportionally insulted his actors - in "Desolation". Huge musical cues 'instructing' the audience of the drama or character development that was supposed to be on screen, at all times. This seems to be because he cannot elicit real performances from his actors.

I might muse that this is because to Jackson, they are not actors - but merely the armatures on which he templates his green-screen composited glory... But to assume that this is the root of his deficiency, rather than another symptom of of his artlessness, would be to succumb to curmudgeonly urges.

The lesson to be taken away is that Jackson should be designing games, not ruining popular cinema.

It appears that - despite the contempt it provoked in my teenaged self - Rankin and Bass actually produced the best ever adaptation of Tolkien, with the greatest respect and truth towards the source text in feel and substance. Perhaps, when we have destroyed the concept of copyright as a tool of corporate greed, another - more thoughtful - filmmaker might use this as a point of departure for a loving and well-crafted "Hobbit".

The wireless tools complicate everything. Otherwise? Yes. I'd just edit the interface descriptions in /etc/network/interfaces ...