Pratchett's are too short for this argument.

To really drive the point, use Steven Erickson's Malazan Book of the Fallen instead. 10 books, one at 700 pages, 4 at 1000 pages and 5 at 1300 pages from 1999 to 2011. Love it or hate it, he kept the plot lines neat, didn't forget major characters and actually came got it to an end.

Then Congress should pass that law ASAP. It's ridiculous, just like a child throwing a temper tantrum.

A lot of the Prometheus complaints seem to originate from the concept that the crew should have been a 100% perfectly professional team that knew exactly what to do in all situations. Given what Weyland was trying to accomplish, it's not surprising that some of the crew weren't up to the job.

Vickers' team was intended to die to hide what Weyland was up to, so the "exploration" specialists that weren't critical to the process were chosen to be expendable and characterized as such. They were stupid idiots because they weren't professional explorers, but lured there by money to fill an gap in the roster. If they had pulled in a completely professional team, Weyland and David wouldn't have been able to get the situation to the state they needed it.

I'm constantly amused by the number of people who get so upset when a movie portrays characters this way. It isn't a failure of the writers, it's a success in portraying an imperfect, greed-motivated person who thinks they are in the position they are in because they are the best, but actually aren't. Maybe that hits a little close to home for some.

Since the automated Comcast etc letters are polite, in legal terms, requests to take down the allegedly infringing media, you can argue that they are the entity requesting the destruction of evidence in their own case. Since they allege they own the media, they assume it is within their rights to do so. Until you actually get sued, acting on those legal requests is perfectly valid even if you delay the deleting of the media. It would only be once you were served with notice of intent to sue with instructions to preserve the evidence that you may become liable.

Lovely strawman, I tip my hat to you. Quoting a line from an era when eugenics was considered good science and not following up with her change of stance when the whole eugenics crap was discredited following WW2.

I've said it many times over, people are allowed to change their minds when new knowledge comes to light and old stances should not be commented on in solo when their enlightened stance has replaced the old one. It's bad science and bad argument.

If you went and read Linus' rant, then you'll find you are actually reinforcing his argument. He says that except for a handful of edge use-cases, there will be no demand for massively parallel in end user usage and that we shouldn't waste time that could be better spent optimizing the low-core processes.

The CAD, video and HTPC use-cases are already solved by the GPU architecture and don't need to be re-solved by inefficient CPU algorithms.

Your Linux workstation would be a good example, but is a very low user count requirement and can be done at the compiler level and not the core OS level anyway.

Your Linux gaming machine shouldn't be doing more than 3/4 cores of CPU and handing the heavy grunt work off to the GPU anyway. No need for a 64 core CPU for that one.

Redesigning what we're already doing successfully with a low number of controller/data shifting CPU cores managing a large bank of dedicated rendering/physics GPU cores and task-specific ASICs for things like 10GB networking and 6GB IO interfaces is pretty pointless, which is what Linus is talking about, not that we only need 4 cores and nothing else.

Only in the sense that it is also a striking copy of every robotic arm in existence. The mechanical design is significantly different to the uArm. Compare MeArm versus uArm and look at the design of the support and actuator arms.

They are modular, but apparently the design of the F-35 airframe can't take the newer modules because they are larger than was planned for and stick out a bit, thus breaking the stealth.

The US should just give up on this stealthy size of a bumblebee crap, yes it has a low radar return and looks like a bumblebee on a radar, but it's moving at Mach 1.5.

Yep. Probably one of a few. Those who have followed Tesla over 2014 know what Superchargers are in the Tesla context. Also, the capital was a giveaway.

Even in Middle Earth. This can't be classed as a problem with the movies, the issue exists in the source material as well.

Throughout both The LoTR and The Hobbit, the heroes are mostly invincible. Aragorn and the Nazgul on Weathertop, the Mines of Moria, the Orcs at Amon Hen, Gimli and Legolas at Helm's Deep, and so on and so on.

Even Boromir was nigh-on unkillable at Amon Hen and only died because Tolkien needed him to. The book has him "pierced by many arrows" and the heroes there had a kill-ratio of at least 10-1. More if you discount the hobbits.

If anything, the kill-ratios were lowered for the movies. Read the LOTR Wikia entry for Amon Hen http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Skirmish_at_Amon_Hen for a comparison.

Firstly, this isn't a general law, it's an amendment to the law governing foreign sales of military technology. It only applies if a specific technology is classified as solely defense or strategic. Yes that classification can be manipulated, but a court would have to be convinced that the classification is valid.

Secondly, the bill isn't doing away with the presumption of innocence globally. It is saying that if a person selling the regulated technology relies on the exceptions and regulations to decide whether it is safe to supply technology, that they have documented that reliance properly. Basically they want people to do their homework before handing classified military information over to a foreign actor. Seems fair enough.

There's a difference between copying the command syntax, which has been held as valid in some jurisdictions, and photocopying the manuals.

If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times, run the manuals through Google Translate twice and then run Word's grammar checks.

If you copy verbatim, you gonna get caught.

Google has $550 million, the article has $550,000 million. Out by 10^3.