You defeat your own argument by bringing up lens flare. JJ Abrams says it adds immediacy by implying that the cameraman was actually there, filming it, and didn't have enough time to set up the camera to avoid it. What Abrams misses is that making it self-consciously "filmed" reduces immediacy, because it means that the audience isn't there. In Babylon 5, the lens flare was mostly restricted to outer space, not inside the station, and the effect was doubly powerful. Lens flare in space said "you are not here", and the viewer was consequently deeper immersed in the illusion of being trapped in a tin can floating in space.

It annoyed me more than it should that the one epilogue was the sailing to the west bit, and there was a modern braided synthetic rope in the rigging. Because elves are sophisticated.

Muscle-memory has a lot to answer for in typos. Quite often I end up typing "ing" for words ending -ing, eg withing, or "and" instead of -an.

Of course I meant to say "for anyone based in the US"...

For anyone based in the UK who wants to make a submission against this, I suggest you base your argument on the versatility of wifi and its use in closed networks.

For example, there are apps for Android and iOS that let you use your phone as a NAS box (network addressed storage) and this would break it. Or apps that use wifi to use your phone as a remote control for the media player software on your PC.

If you build a list of the non-internet use cases for wifi, focusing particularly on activities business travellers are very likely to use, then it would be extremely hard for the FCC to find that Marriott's move isn't antagonistic to guests....

No, it's them refusing to accept that they overestimated the value of wifi in the first instance. If the US is anything like the UK, the big chains will have been the first to jump on the "internet" bandwagon, and being the risk-averse cheapskates that they are, will have franchised out the internet to a third party. It's quite possible that Marriott don't even own the networking infrastructure installed in the building, and that they basically act as an agent by selling it to visitors. For a good few years, they got away with it, because they were selling it to business travellers who didn't care seeing as it was going on expenses -- heck, even when many smaller hotels were rolling out free wifi, some of the big hotels still offered paid-for internet only, and even then, it was wired internet ("if you don't have an Ethernet cable, please ask at reception"). Now they find themselves in a position where that business model has been blown apart because the single important class of customer -- the expense-account business traveller -- has an internet connection in his pocket.

IE. their business model was shit, and now rather than writing off the losses, they're trying to artificially shore it up.

Yeah, but add in the blocking signals for all those devices, and even the hotel wifi will be goosed.

Here in the UK, the problem big hotel chains have is that they sold off the wifi as a franchise, thinking it would be a marketing boon to have wifi, but without having to pay the installation costs themselves. But then wifi became heavily commoditised and al the smaller hotels set up their wifi themselves and ran it as a basic cost. By not stumping up for their own internal wifi, the big players backed themselves into a corner -- they weren't able to offer free wifi without buying out the contract and infrastructure (cabling, routers etc) from their partner, and why would a professional public wifi outfit give up one of their few sources of income? Particularly given the number of business travels who don't give two hoots about the price as they're just going to put it on expenses anyway...?

I suspect the situation is the same in the US, and the problem is that those pesky business travellers are now using tethered phones or portable hotspots. They're trying to re-establish an environment where the business travellers will just shrug their shoulders, pay the fee and expense it. Independent travellers and the sell-employed... well, they're just low-value collateral damage.

Next thing you know, you'll be restricted to 100ml bottles of liquids...

A) A chicken-fried steak. What is one of those? (Now answered.)
B) The "when it's at home" is just a turn of phrase used to emphasise cluelessness. At least where I'm from.

It's not difficult to parse the syntax, even if you can't grasp the semantic meaning.

A basic syntactic analysis would probably identify it as a noun and pronounce it as intended (if it was used in a sentence) -- just as it would distinguish between the verb "record" and the noun "record".

No, it wouldn't. Grammatical analysis is still a non-trivial task, as many of the syntactic rules are only applicable with certain words or classes of words -- ie there is no rule of "correct" syntax that can be determined without understanding the semantics. Without knowing the meaning and usage of two nouns, it would be impossible to computationally determine whether "woogoobloo–boobleell" should be correctly rendered "woogoobloo-boobleell" or "woogoobloo – boobleell". It's a task you could not do on a portable ebook reader on the fly. You might be able to manage a 75-90% accuracy on a cloud server model, but that's not efficient.

...which is precisely what he did. The Slashdot time warp strikes again.

Why bother writing that when you're an American and therefore hate math? If you think I'm overgeneralising, then you'll hopefully see my point.