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.

Not knowing about trickier parts of a language doesn't mean that you don't use them. I recently discovered some code where experienced C programmers didn't know that signed integer overflow was undefined in C. This meant that the compiler could optimise one of their tests away in a loop (nontrivially, in a way that's difficult to generate a warning for) and turn it into an infinite loop. After a few weeks, their code would hit this case and infinite loop and freeze. Unless you know that this tricky part of the language exists, you don't know enough to avoid using it.

The original justifications for hating goto referred to a non-local goto (or, exceptions, as the kids call them these days) which made it very difficult to reason about control flow in a program. The new reasons for hating goto in language like C/C++ relate to variable lifetimes and making it difficult to reason about when variables go out of scope.

That is interesting -- because chauffer in English means the person who drives your limousine.

The man responsible for the fire on a steam locomotive is called a fireman. (It's actually moderately skilled -- the fire is large, and needs to be balanced, and provide the right level of heat, and not waste coal. I had a go when I was about 13, unofficially on a tourist steam railway.)

I don't think you even need your eyes open. When I was at school I was given a tour of the local pharmacutical R&D company's facility. They had trouble with animal rights protesters, so the fence would alert security if it was knocked by a person and bring up the appropriate CCTV camera to that panel.

There was an article a few years ago about how Congressmen judged popular support. I don't know how true it is now, but back then most of them got under ten letters for any given bill. Anything that got 100 was judged to be really important to their constituents. Basically, if everyone on Slashdot who is a registered voter in the USA actually bothered contacting their representatives (a form letter doesn't count, those are ignored, but a couple of short paragraphs will be counted as a separate mail) then they'd be perceived as representing popular opinion.

Sounds like a good way for Uber to end up in a lot of courts. If they thought that the lawsuits for violating various taxi laws were bad, wait until they see the ones for violating every variant implementation of the EU data protection directive...

The lack of seatbelts makes sense. If you're on a spaceship that can accelerate quickly enough to turn everyone into a fine paste and relies on inertial dampeners (adjustments of the artificial gravity) to prevent this, then there aren't many situations where you'll need a seatbelt: either the inertial dampeners are preventing you from needing them, or you're dead. The problem is that the drama needed the ship to seem to shake. It's the same issue as feeling the ship warm up as you get close to a star: it makes for good drama, but the difference between 'humans are comfortable' and 'humans are on fire' is tiny compared to the difference between 'humans are comfortable' and 'nuclear fusion is happening' - it's far more likely that the shields would work fine and no one would be discomforted right up until the point where much of the ship vaporised.

I was quite surprised by the numbers they had for the old model. On my 2014 MBP, I recently did some tests doing sha calculations of VM images. These were multithreaded and not CPU-bound, but they ended up getting almost 2GB/s reads from the SSD. The benchmark is interleaving reads and writes, so that may account for it, but if you're just loading game data from disk then the old model can fill the whole of physical RAM in 8 seconds, so I doubt that's the bottleneck.

Finding people is what directories are for. Pictures, Location, affiliations... whatever people want to put out there. And what is to prevent a standard protocol for people to share their friends lists with their friends?

It isn't an abuse of shared infrastructure to send multiple people emails. Facebook is just a different type of social contract. You put something out there and you know it isn't certain anyone will see it, but there is feedback "like" when they do. With emails you expected people to read them, although with some possible delay. versus Texts or IMs which usually you expect an immediate read/response.

Facebook solved the problem of contact management very nicely. I remember the days of sending mass emails to all your contacts with new contact information... unless you manually updated your contact database then it was over and you didn't have great control over who's emails you would see and you couldn't discover old friends online...

To retain some small semblance of our privacy though we really need a set of Internet communications protocols for updating and managing address books and some sort of open directory infrastructure where people could register and look up and discover friends. But keep the information about who is connected to who private and not mediated by an all knowing third party who is selling that data to the highest bidder where it is really being used against our interests.

All it would really take is some protocol for sending or attaching updated contact info in an email or over any other protocol that a client would then use to automatically update a local/server copy of your friends list. People still rely on web mail primarily so the data would likely remain vulnerable to snooping, but at least people would have the option of keeping their data on privately owned hardware.

If people are actually being killed, then as soon as you get near the house you're likely to hear screams / gunshots. If they're just being threatened, then you have time to plan something that has a good chance of having the victims survive. Well-trained police forces don't rush in guns blazing.

Step one, drive past the house - no sirens or lights, just see if there's anything odd. Step two, knock on a couple of the neighbours' doors - say that you've received a non-specific report of gunfire in the area, ask if they heard anything. Step three, from somewhere inconspicuous see if you can see in through the windows with binoculars. Step four, visit the nearest take-away and have someone in plain clothes take the food to the house pretending that they misread the number, look for signs of distress from the person answering the door. Step five, surround the house with armed officers at all exits and have someone in uniform knock on the front door and ask the person who answers to step outside - if they're refusing and showing signs of distress, then go in.

Or they could just forget all of their police training and pretend that their soldiers in enemy territory.