I read two of her books and absolutely hated them, and both were highly recommended. I don't think I'd ever read anything of hers again. Too much stuff that's actually good out there.

A while back there was research out of MIT for new coatings to keep substances sticking to the walls of bottles. http://www.fastcoexist.com/1679878/mits-freaky-non-stick-coating-keeps-ketchup-flowing. How about something like this? For the thermometers. Not sure I want that stuff in my heart either.

It depends on who wrote those nine lines of code.

Who gives a shit about other people's feelings.

"You know it might just be possible that Swedish prisons were actually working to rehabilitate the prisoners. Victims of their own success?"

Sooooo... You're blaming the victims... ;)

Yes, yes I will be sorry. I'd rather have the $14 extra PER TICKET from seeing it on whatever screen it is playing on at the cheap-seats than going OOOOOOHHH for two hours.

I'm made plenty of mistakes with money. One that I no longer make is on entertainment, movies in particular. I'll get 95% of the enjoyment from seeing it on the small screen as I would on the large, and for a whole lot less. And, really, since I don't waste money on 3D, I really don't know what I'm missing, nor do I care.

Priorities: We all set different ones.

Sorry, I'm just not going to buy ebooks until they fix the pricing. When the role playing game industry went to direct digital distribution, it was understood that the product was 50% off. Amazon, however, thinks that not only do I need to shell out a couple hundred dollars for a proprietary device that allows them to remote delete my purchased products, but that they also get to charge a premium for the product itself. No thank you.

If I buy a used book through Amazon, odds are that I can find it for under 1 dollar. I can frequently find it for 1 cent. But I have to pay $3.99 for S&H for *each* book. Maybe the brick & mortar stores should sell said books for $2-$3, so that the total purchase price is less than Amazon + S&H. 50% of something is better than 100% of nothing, and that's what B&M stores are looking at.

There's an old mantra about getting bodies in the store. It's not that simple. They need to pull wallets out. If people are going into B&M stores to window shop, then purchasing online via Amazon, then the B&M stores need to lower their prices to be competitive, or offer some other reason for people to spend money there. It has to be something that Amazon can't offer. Drinking coffee is not going to cut it.

In a supposedly free country...

The consumer is at a disadvantage here. If everyone were honest, then no, maybe we shouldn't ban it. But that would required companies to not have laws and regulations written to their specs, allowing them to do things like claim 0.0g per 4oz serving to use the under 0.5g loophole. But because that's not the case, then someone needs to step in and regulate it fairly.

Beyond that, there are times when it really should not be up to the consumer. There is zero legitimate reason to be poisoning the food supply. "Because it tastes better" and "Because it's cheaper" and "Because it stores longer" are not legitimate reasons.

A friend of mine said that the acting and plot was so bad that it ruined all the tits and ass. He was right.

Mod parent up. That page should be required reading for anyone who wants to put their spin on why the book is bad and how the movie was a legitimate treatment.

About a year after the movie came out I was in the book store and found a book about the making of the SST movie. In it they talk about the guys who originally wrote the script wanting to make a movie about WW1 soldiers fighting bugs. They couldn't find any takers. Someone said they should look at SST because it was about soldiers fighting bugs. They did, liked it, convinced Virginia Heinlein to option the movie rights to them, and they managed to get Verhoeven involved. He wanted to make a movie that satirized his experiences with fascist states and took it in that direction, and repeatedly admitted that he never bothered reading the book. When the budget cuts came and it was a choice between power armor and bugs, bugs won out because that was the point of the movie. Total hatchet job.

You did a better job explaining it than I could. Mod parent up.

Close. You don't get to live in a free society without being required to contribute something to it. As I said elsewhere, the book was explicit about *Federal* service being a requirement for citizenship, not *military* service. He did make the distinction. He also made the distinction that the only real benefit to citizenship over being a civilian was being able to vote. The main character's father was a very successful businessman, but he was not a citizen.

Considering the way people on /. routinely blast voting it's pretty damn hypocritical to now use that as an excuse to attack the author and his book.

If that's really what you thought then maybe you should try actually reading the book. The book was explicit that *military* service was *not* a requirement for citizenship. *Federal* service was. If you think the two are the same...

Interesting. Please explain how you can satirize a source which you have not read.