Let's help out our editors! Let's propose 4/1 stories that we'd like to see, and we just mod up/down good ideas & bad ideas. Maybe they'll take notice.

Good 4/1 stories:

Slashdot Beta code adopted for official North Korea website.
Bill Gates first in line at Apple Store to buy Gold iWatch.
World returns to normal as Hell, Michigan, begins to thaw.

With the Prequels, Lucas did everything

This cannot be overstated enough. Go watch the 'making of' featurettes for Phantom Menace. You'll see Lucas saying things like "I liked Liam's forth take, but I liked Ewan's thirteenth take." Seeing as how they're greenscreened, he'd simply take the left half of take four, the right half of take thirteen, paste them together, and put in the background.

Which means you have both actors looking at, responding to, and acting against a person who wasn't there.

And that's when there's actually two humans interacting! Now have them acting against a character who is represented by a stick with masking tape at that character's eye level.

Note also that both lines were overdubbed, as Ray Park's voice was judged insufficiently low and menacing.

Explicit language might modify what would otherwise be there only by an implicit doctrine.

In general, a licensor can modify their own terms. So, if you are using the GPL on software to which you hold the copyright, and you add some sort of exception, it applies. You can't do it to other people's software.

I could have put up with the bad acting if there had been a good script and a story that made sense. Rewatching some of the original Star Trek is like that: the acting is wooden and the sets are obviously cheap, but there's some fantastic dialog and story telling in there. Hint for writers: if your script relies on everyone in the universe being stupid at the same time, it may be realistic but it's not going to be enjoyable (unless it's a comedy about stupidity).

It's not just the teeth. You particularly notice this if you compare US and UK TV. I find it really hard to tell the actors on US TV apart, particularly the female ones who seem to mostly conform to 2-3 stereotypical appearances. The same is true for the young male ones, though at least there are some older male roles that have distinctive appearances. There are very few ugly actors. Compare this with a BBC drama, where there will be a whole range of physiques.

I find it harms willing suspension of disbelief when watching US shows. I sit there thinking 'really, everyone in this low-income school has a personal trainer and stylist? And these people manage to have perfect hair as soon as they wake up or after running through the mud?' Actually, the UK isn't immune from the last part: Sean Bean in Shape has magic hair that is immune to mud, gunsmoke, and everything else the napoleonic wars can throw at him. No matter how dirty his face and uniform get, his hair always looks as if he's just come from the hairdresser.

Most people's perception of how airships should behave from holes is wrong, and it's based on their experience with party balloons. The reason for the differences are:

* Party balloons are pressurized - the skin is stretched taught. The skin on airships are loose.
* Skin area (and thus leak rate) scales proportional to the radius squared, while the volume scales proportional to the radius cubed. Airships are many, many orders of magnitude larger than party balloons. Consequently the rate in which gas can leak out of a hope is drastically lower.

Even large holes in airships don't take them down quickly. Even a moderate sized airship can generally continue flying to its destination and then fix the damage and refill there.

The actors had nothing to react to and nowhere to go. Basically the whole damn thing was shot on green screen, with a two camera setup. Lucas could just park his ass in his chair, look at the monitors, and do nothing. Makes it hard when you are not only having to imagine the entire set and everything you are supposed to be seeing and reacting to, but also are on a small stage and can't even more around much.

He had a lot of people he was answerable to. Sure he wrote the script for the first one (other screenwriters did the second and third) but it wasn't the Lucas show. The producers worked for the studio, not him, he had others who would question his decisions, make changes, etc. He was in charge only in so far as being the director, who does have a good deal of control, but still plenty of limits.

Not the case for the new three. It was an all-Lucas team. He was in charge, surrounded by yes men and did whatever the fuck he wanted. The result was really bad.

I am still having a little trouble with "we don't need our spies to spy". Maybe we do.

I am also having trouble believing that the kind of encryption we use on the Internet actually stops the U.S. Government from finding out whatever it wishes although IETF and sysadmins might be kidding themselves that it can. Government can get to the end systems. They can subborn your staff. Etc.

MS language is potentially worse than the default. And there is room for litigation to surprise us.

Link

There's still no working support for the Media Source Extensions, and as a result it has incomplete support for YouTube's HTML5 player. Lame.

Yes. The last stuff I wrote that I couldn't compile today was in "Promal" or "Paradox". My C and C++ code from 1980 still builds and runs.

All of my web development is on Ruby on Rails. That environment has had a lot of development and I've had to port to new versions. So old code for RoR would not quite run out of the box, but it's close.