What's so horrible about The Hobbit?

The book? Nothing. It's a decent story. I like it.

But if you're talking about the movie trilogy then there's a problem. It isn't "The Hobbit". It's a movie that wants to be "tolkienesque" and uses names and scenes that Tolkien had used in his stories. The same as the "I, Robot" movie was with Asimov's stories.

Look at the page count in The Lord of the Rings. Then compare it to the page count in The Hobbit.

Now compare the run time of the movies. Either LoTR got butchered or The Hobbit was puffed up with standard Hollywood hero crap.

I'm skipping it because I do not want ANOTHER generic Hollywood cliche driven green-screen-spectacle-fest.

Adblock Edge

Fuck Everything. We're doing five blades.

That's based on the premise that the model T was less expensive than a horse

No, it's based on the premise of the Model-T being the cheapest possible automobile.

It's not obvious that the automobile would take off, though the piles of horse feces in city streets should have been a hint. But it is obvious that the best chance anybody has, starting a new market, is to go for the least-expensive possible vehicle.

otherwise Ford wouldn't have been the only one in the USA doing it so cheaply/successfully for the better part of 10 years.

Ford found a way to do it very cheaply, that had escaped all others. There were plenty of other car makers out there, and once they adopted the assembly-line model, they started competing with Ford, too.

Trust me, from a guy who's dealt with COBOL and Java, they're nothing alike in either corporate philosophy or boat-anchor of coding. For better or worse, Java and C# are essentially analogs in terms of what you can 'do' with them. Java sucks more in UI's, and some syntactic sugar that makes your life easier, and C#/.NET lacks the trillion toolkits used in Java for pretty much any common need. Many popular Java lib's are ported to .Net, but still a boat load you'll only find in Java land for now. Lets not labor the point. There will be a millions fan boys to jump on the point, but on a language stand point, they're so close that it shouldn't matter.

PHP is a simple language for beginners and it got its entrenched status because some novice PHP dev's wrote some great sites / tools which people have organically grown around. Its a lousy language, and a very specific use case. I've never used RoR, but sounds about the same but in a more sexy buzz word.

Erlang like all functional languages universally are very useful for their very limited number of business areas where they rock, and enevitably the evangelists of these languages always trump out how they're great for everything and the kitchen sink, but we all know they aren't, and will continually be relegated to areas where they shine. Hybrids like Scala have a chance, but frankly I'd hate to sit down and listen to a dev lead's meeting in a scala shop lay down the laws on when to use strictly functional no matter how broken it makes the code, and when to just use other paradigms that probably just work better, simpler, and faster to develop.

Of course you also have the option of throwing an ice chest in your car, stocked with whatever sizes of soda you prefer. You could save tons of money, and entirely eliminate waste, by buying 3 litre bottles of generic sodas for $1, and using whatever size cup/bottle you prefer.

That's not a solution. Go back and re-read what I said about the 20 oz. going flat before I could finish it.

Generally, you didn't comprehend much of what I wrote. Coca Cola is a *treat* for me now, not a staple like once was.

That said, it's interesting that through your mist of incomprehension you actually came close to mentioning some things I do now.

If I'm on something other than a grocery run, like a day trip to the beach or something, I do pack a cooler. I have a couple of Glacier (TM) water bottles that are reusable. Theae are available at Whole Foods near here. You pay $6.99 for 750ml of water, which sounds crazy until you factor in the fact that you're getting a reusable stainless bottle for much less than what empty stainless is often sold for. I'm not affiliated with either company.

For the fizzy craving, travel sized Welch's grape juice + Perrier. Once again, not affiliated with either company. This makes a fantastic grape soda, and you know that everything in it is good. Once again though, this is only for an all-day trip. Yes, Perrier makes a difference--it's got a "bite" that I only used to find in Calistoga sparkling water, which is no longer available here.

Maybe now you get the idea that I'm not going to be satisfied lugging over-sized bottles of ever-flattening generic HFCS infused soda around in my car.

The problem of right-sized Coca Cola not being widely available remains. Also noted, It's definitely a "first world problem" we're whining about here.

Population per sq. KM:

Rank Country/Region Density
(Pop. per km2)
1 Singapore 7301
2 Hong Kong 6396
3 Gaza Strip 5045
4 Bahrain 646
5 Bangladesh 1034
6 Palestine 711
7 Taiwan (R.O.C) 646
8 Mauritius 631
9 South Korea 505
10 Lebanon 475
11 Rwanda 407

Its hard to find a place in the west bank that wouldn't be around something of importance, and many many people. You may as well say that Hamas shouldn't set up missiles anywhere, because invariably any blow back will guarantee human fatalities. Just submit nicely and live in your holes while your friendly neighbourhood rulers do the same.

That's it for your punishment you must create a character for Rolemaster.

Everyone has moved away from it to either Pathfinder or 13Th age. DnD is on it's way to becoming another savage worlds for lovers of crunchy dice rolling only.

"I don't think any laptop has ever been produced that consumes more than 150W."

I had one, the Samsung Series 7 gaming laptop monster with dual video cards.

200 Watts.

The old Henry Ford saying goes (not that he necessarily said it) "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses".

Of course faster horses weren't an option. And what were the early cars, other than bare-bones "horseless carriages"? It's not as if the Model-T was a Ferrari in an age of wagons.

Consumers almost always choose "cheaper" when the price is significant. Designing the cheapest possible car, within the confines of the engineering of the day, seems like an obvious choice, and basically what they did.

Half of your customers buy the iPhone. All those people who said, "Oh, I'm going to buy QWERTY," boom, take them out of the equation."

Funny, because Sprint has pushed the iPhone harder than anyone. The cut-rate prices with the iPhone, even on already-cut-rate services like Sprint's Virgin Mobile, are tempting. They practically PAY YOU to take an iPhone. There were articles about how they were contractually required to sell X iPhones from their deal with Apple, but it sounds like they had to undermine the rest of their business to get it done.

I also specified Android, since almost nobody wants feature phones or Windows, which returned just EIGHT. Then I required LTE, which brought it down to just FOUR:

LG Enact (Available on Verizon)

LG Mach (no longer available, Sprint)

LG Optimus F3Q (Available on T-Mobile)

Samsung Stratosphere / Galaxy Metrix 4G (For sale on Amazon, not listed as available by Verizon. YMMV)

and, despite the findings of your rigorous "informal online survey", there actually ISN'T that much demand for such a device.

Sliders made up 30% of US phone sales, a short time ago. There's no mistaking those numbers. There are a large number of people who want them. Perhaps they, like me, are reluctantly sticking with older sliders, waiting for a compelling device to come out. Maybe a few are reluctantly accepting non-sliders, with no other options from work or their preferred carrier.

Hell, I'd have switched to Republic Wireless, or Ting, or others, if they had a compelling Android slider available with their service. I never even considered an iPhone, for their omission. Lots of companies are losing decent chunks of money, for ignoring this market.

I was planning to sign-up with T-Mobile, too, and delayed for being unable to find a slider for myself, and the plan isn't such a good deal with fewer people on it. I later realized they had just one, but their website doesn't have it classified correctly, so you get no results when you narrow it down to Android and Qwerty, but I find their service less-compelling today, so several potential customers were lost.

Not sure where this rant came from, but...

Coke and Pepsi both have sold mini-cans, about 8oz, for quite a few years. It's up to the convenience stores you visit to choose to stock them, or not. And if they determine that they can't make a profit on them, they shouldn't stock what YOU happen to want.

http://online.wsj.com/news/art...

Of course you also have the option of throwing an ice chest in your car, stocked with whatever sizes of soda you prefer. You could save tons of money, and entirely eliminate waste, by buying 3 litre bottles of generic sodas for $1, and using whatever size cup/bottle you prefer.

Or you could just drink water... Cold water and crushed/cubed ice in the door of my refrigerator, with a 5 year filter to eliminate the bad chlorine taste, is easily the best and most convenient option for drinking I've found.

For some flavor, drink powders (iced-tea, lemonade, hawaiian punch, tang, gatorade, etc.) are far cheaper than buying water that's been trucked across the country, and can be mixed into drinks in whatever sizes or strengths you happen to prefer. They even sell "stick" packs to be dumped into bottles of water, though you're far better off if you reuse and refill any water bottles you buy.

Who said anything about drinking from a cup? Not every convenience store has a fountain, and even if they do the performance is inconsistent. Vending machines are definitely not fountains. There's no "cup" a lot of times.

There were many times in my Coke-drinking days when I'd partially empty a 20 oz. I just hated wasting the stuff; but I knew I didn't want to drink all of it. It always went flat before I wanted any more.

BTW, the Mexican cokes are still a bit too big. 12 oz. (355 ml) or half-liter. I find 12 oz., poured over ice and shared with somebody is best; although I can tolerate 12 oz. The half-liter is a disturbing trend. The Mexicans certainly don't need it, since they just surpassed the US in obesity.

BTW, I knew the original coke bottle was smaller and found this article about 6.5 oz. bottles.. Sigh... apparently this was available in the UK not that long ago? Maybe they'll bring it back to the US and finally reverse the trend. The original size was just about right. Yes, I'd pay more per oz., but I'd pay the same per *serving*.

Can the Coke executives get that through their heads? Some of us are desiring a *serving*, not a "most ounces for the buck". Wondering what to do with the excess soda, or being suckered into finishing more than you need... is not a pleasant experience. Having a right-sized glass bottle with real sugar in it, that's what some of us want.