Geeze, why is this so hard! This was a clear crash over mainland Europe. We could quickly locate the destroyed plane and acquire the flight recorders, the whole show. Why is it still so clunky to piece together what actually happened? Shouldn't we have more data captured, for example video streams from the cabin and cockpit? It's so annoying when it's 2015 and Facebook knows what kind of socks you will be wearing today, but we have to play Sherlock Holmes with a commercial airliner crash.

I don't see what could go wrong. Once the fix has been done, they only have one step left, which is just a standard procedure of pushing a crystal in a cart into a beam.

Doesn't a diet like that eventually cause heart and circulatory system problems?

Wow, nice to hear someone in a similar situation. I also have sciatic pain (thankly no slipped discs or serious stuff like that) due to too much sitting on my ass. However it's now getting better thanks to increased exercise.

I surely have walked and bicycled aplenty, but my abs and back muscles are garbage.

That is what I love about cooking: it allows me to change components to my liking and compile my own meal. Contrast that to a Dorito chip which is a bloated monolithic blob.

Just put a quick summary in the beginning. :) There's so much information surrounding us these days that it's hard to judge whether reading all of your text is worth it.

Web pages have always been a bit unreliable technology. Who doesn't occasionally meet a page that is almost loaded, but hangs there waiting for one element to be downloaded? At I meet a few times a week a page that gets "stuck". Then you refresh the page and it's fine. Why does this problem still exist? Can't the browser at least quickly try reloading that element?

Imagine if desktop GUI apps were like that. That some GUI element would just randomly not show up. That would be unacceptable.

It requires a big team of senior engineers in mathematics and computer science to create and support something like RenderMan, so it's not unreasonable that they ask money for it.

The idea is probably that hobbyists (many of whom wouldn't have enough spare money to buy it anyway) can get familiar with the software, and then Pixar can sell the software to commercial use where the actual bucks are made. For a fully commercial tool I see this being a pretty nice deal.

Even then the real license costs just $495 per seat, which is cheap. You can easily recoup that investment.